New High Protein Vegetarian Meal-Plan for Weight-Loss with Simple Indian Foods
I have tried 10,000 things to get more protein into my body which actually speedens up weight loss or if you’re not looking to lose weight will still help maintain your current weight and help you stay strong and healthy.
It’s also the best thing out there if you want better skin, great hair and nails. No beauty product can do what magic protein can unleash inside your body.
I am certain most of you already know it is important to get enough of it into your body without too much sugar or fat, hence I thought protein powder was the way to go. But I have used it and haven’t been able to sustain beyond 6 months as it makes me bloated and I feel my digestion gets worse when I use protein powder and I’ve tried all kinds so I got into serious research for my personal protein intake and I was looking for something awesome yet easily digestible and something that I can eat everyday without too much hassle.
So everything I am about to tell you is something I’ve discovered on my own by trial and error, because most conventional methods of upping the protein intake don’t work for me.

This is my current meal plan — I speak for no one but myself and because my friends told me this is great and I should share it with everyone, so here I am.
But in general if you are a woman or a person with delicate digestion, autoimmunity or if protein powders just don’t work for you then this would probably be helpful. Try it out for at least 3 days in a week and see, and let me know how it goes. :)
Breakfast — This is the worst time to eat for me personally, I cannot eat solid food in the morning and lack of breakfast caused me to gain a ton of weight, yes I literally hit 100 kg recently and I knew I had to get my protein-heavy breakfast back because that really helped me the last time I lost weight.
Actually I’d call it fat loss, not weight loss because I am a food addict, and I have never and will never plan to lose kilos by reducing what I eat. Rather it’s by improving what I eat. When you feed yourself nutrient-dense and healthy foods you feel full and satisfied much faster. For example, it takes me 2 bags of potato chips to feel full when I am peckish and craving a snack, but it only takes me 5–6 almonds/walnuts to achieve the same fullness and the best part is that almonds and walnuts are actually doing me some good. That bag of chips is not !
So for breakfast I’m looking for a nice easy to drink, easy to digest, immunity boosting, high protein meal. Wow! That’s way too much to ask for — or is it?
. 4–5 fresh and thoroughly washed green leaves of Spinach. (paalak)
. 3 spoons of Besan (Indian Chick-pea flour) or 1 cup of boiled chickpeas (chole) or 3 cups of boiled green peas.
. 4 slices of apple. (seb)
. 1 fully-ripe banana. (kela)
. 1 small piece of ginger. (adrak)
. 1 spoon of cinnamon powder (or directly add 2 pieces of cinnamon bark) (dalchini)
. 1/4 spoon of turmeric powder or 1 piece of turmeric root. (haldi)
. a few leaves of coriander/cilantro. (dhania)
Now put these in a smoothie-maker/blender jar/nutribullet and fill it with water right to the top — more water will ensure it will be liquidy and drinkable not thick and clumpy. Blend all these together for 5 minutes till everything becomes nice and smooth.
I know this sounds wrong and feels wrong but just trust me on this it tastes great. You can add a spoon of honey or more fruits to make it sweeter if you like but the apple, banana and cinnamon are enough to mask the flavour of spinach and chickpeas which are both acting as our protein sources.
This is a fibre-rich and complete breakfast which will be an adequate replacement for a meal, without using any artificial sources of protein.
Nutritionally 100 gm of boiled chickpeas will provide 19 g of protein and the handful of spinach will add 1–2 gms more plus much-needed iron. The apple slices and banana will provide vitamins and yes some sugar which your body needs in the morning. The ginger, cinnamon, turmeric and coriander all will act as the immunity-boosting and detoxifying component of the smoothie.
In summers, you can use cold water to make it and the smoothie tastes divine. You can vary the quantities to adjust it as per your taste. The first time I put in so much spinach it was horrible so I did learn it the hard way, it is important to put less of the green stuff because even though you may put up with the bad taste for a week or two, it won’t last long. So this time I focused on the taste because that’s the only reason to be honest with you that I eat food. LOL.
In winters you can put all the whole ingredients in a bowl and just have it as a salad. The dressing on this salad can be — raw eggwhite sweetened with honey or salt and pepper as you prefer. (Don’s use anything from outside your kitchen as it’s gonna be all processed crap.)
Lunch — This is a very important meal, do not skip it.
I started avoiding lunch because either I’d eat too much and feel drowsy and unable to concentrate on my work or feel gassy and bloated because I’d not even have eaten breakfast by then. This is the time when I gained most of my weight so learn from this and yes there is a solution.
Having a liquid smoothie for breakfast can make you very hungry at lunch time so first if you’ve had the breakfast smoothie at 8 or 9 am then have your lunch by 1 pm.
Now since you cannot make a smoothie at work, you could carry a salad you made at home or a meal.
My lunch is a protein-heavy meal as my goal is fat loss and this is the only thing that works for me.
Soy-spinach hot salad:- Yes HOT SALAD!!! The thing you can eat everyday and is unlike normal cold salads which you cannot keep eating for long.

Dinner at 7 pm.
How ? Why? Aren’t you supposed to like have an evening snack and then dinner for best results?
Again, this is my personal plan and works for me and after lunch I am so busy at work that I cannot have a snack, or if I do make time for a snack I end up overeating and then have a late dinner, which again is no good for me. I saw the best results with my tummy-fat and my stomach gets lean very quickly when I have an early dinner and then a late night snack.
So at 5 or 6 pm I do have a cup of unsweetened coffee, you can have tea too. If you must use sugar, add brown unrefined sugar or jaggery powder (shakkar) and try to keep reducing the quantity of sugar till you find the taste of coffee/tea with no sugar kinda great. I am really happy with the nice bitter cocoa flavour of my coffee because I am used to it and I went very slowly with reducing the sugar in it, like it took me 6 months to start liking it. Have patience with yourself and your goals. :)
I like my dinner heavy and hot, and loaded with the good stuff. I cannot simply eat a salad or drink a smoothie as my appetite is usually at its peak by 7 pm. So I have a normal Indian meal at this time but with a few changes.
1 cooked cup of veggies — anything you love. Try using something like green peas and raw cottage cheese, not fried — mattar paneer is really full of good protein and calcium, have it at least once a week.
1 cup of cooked lentils with gravy — daal. (again no restrictions- go rajma, go kaali daal, whatever you enjoy.)
1 small salad — usually some cucumber and onions. I squeeze a lemon on the onions for that extra kick. Sometimes I also take lime pickle if I feel like it. (The aim is to give yourself all the flavours your body is craving for and to not restrict the pleasures of the tongue.)
3 Jowar Rotis/ Besan rotis. (This is the hard part. I am a horrible cook so I usually outsource this part. I get my rotis from a lady who runs a premium tiffin service which specially makes these rotis for me. So if you’re like me either you gotta learn to cook for yourself or find someone who can do it for you.)
1 Indian Dessert — my dinner is incomplete without dessert. As with everything else in this plan, the aim is not perfection but progress. So have a small bar of dark chocolate if you’re craving it. Try nice and less sweet tasting desserts by making some yourself- sabudana in milk or sewaiyan, moong dal halwa, gajar halwa, 1 tiny besan laddoo, coconut burfi are all great options as long as you keep the sugar minimal. If you cannot make any of this- try eating a piece of fruit- mango, banana, apple, pineapple, watermelon, musk melon — whatever you like. The problem is with overeating, as long as you eat a little amount of dessert it’s great. And tell yourself that you get to have another dessert with dinner the next day so there’s no need to eat too much of it.
Eating dessert every night sounds like a not so intelligent thing to do but I eat worse and my cravings go ballistic if I don’t indulge my sweet tooth. So actually it ends up making me eat healthier and I stay on course. If I don’t get my dessert, however tiny and non-sugary it is, I don’t feel good.
You can try chewing cardamom also, it really helps with the cravings and is like an Indian version of chewing gum, except it’s all natural and 100 percent vegetarian. Leave out the seeds if you don’t like the taste, just chew the green outer part and it helps for the times when you are starting out on a new meal-plan and you just want to chew on something, but you don’t wanna eat and get fat and feel bad about yourself.
If you’re still hungry, which you won’t be if you chew your food really really slowly so the fact that you’re full kicks in by the time you’re finished, you can have some brown rice. What I personally do, since I am a rice addict :D, I switch up the rotis for rice on the weekends. Also my dinner every sunday is a Biryani or Pulao with curd (raita). Rice is important for me to feel satisfied and happy, otherwise what am I even alive for. :D
Midnight Snack — I am a writer and I do my most productive work late at night so I usually sleep by 1 am, which means I crave a snack around midnight.
The best thing is to drink an unimaginable amount of water — cold or hot depending on the season. Most days this kills the craving, if you’re still hungry which I am especially on my periods, then have a glass of milk, have two glasses of milk. Milk has slow releasing protein called casein, which as depicted in shady bollywood movies, helps you feel full and sleep better. Seriously….works. Add a dash of turmeric powder to make it into a nice immune-boosting snack — this new golden latte is all the craze in the western world now. And you can make it right at home.
If you’re craving something even more, try eating apples- they’re crunchy, satisfy cravings and suppress appetite naturally.
What I would avoid late at night are soups, especially those readymade packet soups — soups act as appetite stimulators, no wonder I feel like I could eat a whole city after I’ve had a hot soup late at night so that’s big no no, learnt this the hard way folks.
Okay now that your meal plan is all set, give it a go. I’ll share more green protein-rich smoothie recipes and lunch recipes as I keep discovering them, while burning things up in my kitchen.
I hope you found this article helpful. Stay happy, stay healthy.
