Four months ago I was unhappy with how I looked and decided I needed to change.
I've been intermittent fasting and exercising and dropped about 10kg, so I'm down to about 70kg.
Now I'm looking at building muscle, but I almost certainly don't get enough protein. When I looked up how much I should be eating, it's about 1.6g per kilo, or for me about 115g.
I've been drinking a meal replacement shake for lunch which is advertised high in protein at about 14g, then eating a reasonably low fat dinner which is definitely not 100g of protein.
I need to get more in, but I just don't know how, and looking online it's lots of specific recipes but I'll end up cooking 3 dinners a day for family which is a lot.
I'm looking at that Surreal cereal which is 15g a serving, which if paired with a protein shake I can bump up to about 35, but I'm still a way out.
How can I bump up the intake relatively easily?
100g of chicken breast offers you around 21g of protein, so two chicken breasts will be around 300g offering you 63g of protein straight away if you dump the meal replacement drink and just ate two chicken breasts for lunch. Couple it with a salad or something if you need to.
A 300g pot of cottage cheese will offer you around 10.5g of protein so having one of those with some kind of meat or even by itself as a snack can help add on some extra.
Tuna is another easy source of high protein that you can smash into other meals just to add additional protein into them.
For breakfasts make something like "overnight oats" with Greek yoghurt and rolled oats, both the yoghurt and the oats are decent enough sources of protein, I often added a scoup of protein powder in with my oats as well as fruit for flavour and that will be a decent bump in your daily protein intake before you've even really started the day.
I have always found the best way of hitting your protein goals is to find something you like best that has high protein in it (for me that is chicken breast) and then go looking for some recipes or create some dishes you like around that core source of protein. My super power is I can eat the exact same meals day in and day out for literally years and not get bored, so I find something I like then just keep making the same thing over and over, either way you need to get used to eating my quantity of those protein high foods which for a lot of people can get boring.
Supplements like protein powders can be good for getting that little bit extra here and there to meet your goals but you are gonna struggle to hit those goals if you rely on them too heavily.
If you wanna bulk and put on muscle mass you have to start eating a lot more basically. Muscle requires more to build but then also maintain.
It will be hard to begin with but sit down and try and plan out a couple of high protein meals you like, start with them and then try and add variety if you need it over time I'd say otherwise you will overwhelm yourself with a shit ton of different recipes and numbers.
Good luck!