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?
How many calories are you eating approximately per day? And can you bump to three meals a day instead of two, like lunch, snack and dinner? Also, do you want to continue to loose weight or just grow muscle at this point? (70 kg is not that much, but I don't know your sex, length)
For starters the meal replacement shake either has way to few calories or is lying about being high protein. It is quite easy to pack 30 grams of protein in a lunch. I always calculate protein in food as a percentage of total calories so 14 grams of protein = 14*4 calories / total calories of the food. If it's above 25% it qualifies for me as high protein, but that would mean your shake only has 224 calories total, which isn't a meal, it's a snack.
I'm with you that anything that purports to replace a meal with 15g of protein is probably not actually "high protein" the way the label claims.
Either way, the only meaningful answers will have to come with an understanding OP's calories per day.
Whole wheat bread is something like 4g of protein per 100 calories, which actually is on target for someone who needs 112g of protein on 3000 calories per day. But it's not on target for someone trying to get 112g of protein on 2000 calories per day.
A glass of milk is 8 g protein with 122 calories.
Even broccoli is 6.7g of protein per 100 calories.
I spent a while trying for 90 grams protein on a 1600 calorie vegetarian diet (small girl trying to lose weight without muscle loss). At that point I needed to supplement with powder and make only the right choices. It gets so much easier when you can eat more in total.
Yeah, 90 grams of protein on 1600 calories is pretty hard, not a lot of wiggle room with whole foods, especially vegetarian.