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Beginners Guide To Macronutrients (a.k.a. Macros)
Macro tracking offers benefits beyond pursuing weight loss: They can help balance your Thyroid Hormone, Adrenals, and any Sex Hormone imbalances. When counting your macros it gives you food freedom and flexibility allowing you to fulfill cravings while still hitting your goals. Counting macros also gives you an energy and mood balance throughout your day.
Let's start out with calories. What are calories?
A calorie is a unit of energy. Calories measure the amount of energy in food and drinks. Calories equal energy. We need calories to perform the basic processes needed to stay alive. Calories determine whether you lose fat, gain fat, or maintain your weight by how much you eat, and how much you burn through various daily activity; both through planned exercise (like resistance training, yoga, running, etc) and non-exercise activity (like walking, typing, fidgeting, folding laundry, dusting, vacuuming, etc). Calories come from the major parts of your food: Protein, Fats, and Carbohydrates. This is where we get our macronutrients.
What are Macros?
Macronutrients are broken down into 3 major groups, each group has a very important role in how our bodies function. It is important to eat foods from each of these groups. Every person requires a different amount energy (a.k.a. calories) of these 3 macronutrients to fuel their body optimally depending on their goals. Tracking macros determines weight loss or weight gain, but optimizing fat loss and muscle growth. Promoting actual physique changes in our bodies Macronutrients are not a one size fits all approach. That's why they are so great.
Before I dive into each group, it is important to know that every gram of each macronutrient provides a certain amount of energy.
1g protein = 4 calories
1g fat = 9 calories
1g carb = 4 calories
Protein
Why we need it?
Protein plays a big roll in our bodies hormones, helping stimulate the growth of various tissues as well as our bones. While building, repairing and maintaining muscle mass. Protein is also the highest when it comes to the thermal effect of food (TEF), meaning it is the hardest to break down (digest) keeping you fuller for longer periods of time. Depending on ones individual goals will determine the proper amount of protein one will need. Protein equals 4 calories per gram.
Fats
Fats don't make you fat! Overconsumption of food does.
We need fats to live.. Fats play a very important role in our body, providing energy, creating and balancing hormone function, brain health, and helps transport vitamins through our body. When it comes to fats there are healthy fats and not as healthy. Examples of healthy fats include salmon, cheese, olives, avocados and coconut oil. On the other hand, saturated fats, which are considered to be less beneficial for the body have been linked to increasing the risk of cardiovascular disease.
Fats contain the highest amount of calories per gram equaling 9 calories per gram.
Carbohydrates
Everyone Loves Carbs and they should!
First and for most carbohydrates (a.k.a. Carbs) are NOT bad, I know they get a bad wrap in the nutrition industry but this is not true. Carbs are the bodies preferred source of energy so a lot of our calories come from them. They are stored in the muscles, brain, and liver. Carbs help balance our hormones and and support better performance in the gym. There are two types of carbohydrates both equaling 4 calories per gram.
Complex Carbs- these are your starches that are broken down and digested slower typically taking around 35-45 min. due to high fiber content, which provides more satiety (fullness) and decreases the likelihood of sugar spikes and crashes.
Simple Carbs- these are broken down and digested faster typically within 15-20 mins. promoting blood sugar spikes, and therefore do not provide much satiety. A lot of the time these will be ingested pre or post workout due to faster absorption.
Okay! Now that I've covered the basics of Macronutrient's. Why should you track macros over calories alone?
-tracking macros can determine weight loss or weight gain, but with the optimization of fat loss and muscle growth, unlike tracking calories which just determines weight loss or weight gain.
- tracking macros promotes and ACTUAL change in your bodies physique, where as tracking calories can't guarantee any physique changes but just a smaller or larger version of ones self.
- tracking macros makes sure you’re body gets exactly what it needs for muscle gain/retention, brain function, and hormones.
-tracking macros gives you food flexibly, it doesn't require you to cut out certain foods, in macro counting there is an 80/20 rule- 80% whole foods and 20% fun foods.
- tracking macros is a tool that allows you to become aware of the actual portion sizes that you are consuming.
-when counting calories alone you may experience an increased appetite due to imbalanced macros.
-You risk having nutritional deficiencies if you're only focused on calories, and not macronutrients.
Reading A Nutrition Label
When reading the label you have serving size, this is how big each serving is and it will tell you how many come in the package. When using the food scale in this instance you would weigh the oats in grams to get a total of 40 grams for one serving.
Next you have the calories- How many calories per serving. Which in this example above the oats have a total of 150 calories for the one serving, which in this case there are 17 servings so for the total package it would be 2550.
Then you look at the grams of protein, how many grams are in each serving. There are 5 grams of protein for each serving of the oats. 5 grams of protein is not very many so I like to pair something like this with some eggs along side to bring that number up.
You also want to pay attention to your fiber intake, this will help with you maintain healthy bowel movements. I would try to stay around the 25-35 gram range per day (a general rule is 14g of fiber for every 1000 calories)
The amount of fats in this serving is 3 grams, this would be considered a lower fat food. Fats are very important for maintaining your hormones, and brain health.
Last we have Carbohydrates, in this one serving it there are 27 grams, these are going to be usually the highest number on the label, due to the fact that carbohydrates is our bodies mains source of energy. Carbohydrates allow us to perform better in all our tasks and also aids in hormone balance, promotes better mood and helps our memory. When cutting too many carbs the first signs you will usually see is low energy, brain fog, and low sex drive.
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