You’ve probably heard the word “macros” or know someone who has “tracked” them when working towards a fat loss or performance goal. The idea of tracking macros is not new in the health and fitness industry, but if it’s new to you, it may seem confusing or intimidating. We use the term Flexible Nutrition to describe the process of tracking macros, which is the approach we use with our clients who are working towards fat loss, performance, and overall health goals.
Today’s post is the first in a two-part series all about tracking your macros. In this post, we’re breaking down what macros are and why we track them. In Part 2, we’ll go a little deeper into how you track your macros and how to know if hiring a coach is right for you.
What is Flexible Nutrition
Flexible Nutrition is the process of counting and tracking macronutrients to work towards a goal. Whether that goal is to lean out, lose weight, gain muscle, perform better, establish healthier eating habits, or improve your relationship with food, tracking your macronutrients allows you to step away from the diet mentality and move past the idea that you need to restrict yourself from the foods you enjoy to reach those goals.
Flexible Nutrition is about fueling your body properly to achieve aesthetic, performance, or lifestyle-related goals.
Flexible Nutrition follow the idea that there are no “clean” foods and no “bad” foods. You do not have to deprive yourself from your favourite treats or restrict yourself from going out to eat with friends or other social events. Filling the majority of your diet with nutrient-rich foods will keep you full, energized, and healthy and eating a diet high in protein will help you maintain lean body mass and prioritize fat loss. Flexible Nutrition allows you to break the cycle of restricting and binging by creating healthy eating habits focused on balance and moderation.
What Are Macros?
The word “macros” is short for macronutrients. There are three main macronutrients: proteins, carbohydrates, and fats. Alcohol is considered the fourth macronutrient, but not a focus since it is not essential part of nutrition and health.
All calories come from these four macronutrients. While just counting calories can be effective method for weight loss, ensuring a balance of macronutrients allows you to optimize your body composition and feel your best while focusing on fat loss rather than just weight loss.
Protein: Protein plays a crucial role in building, maintaining and repairing tissues in the body. It helps enzymes, hormones, and antibodies that aid in your body’s immune process. Great sources of protein include meat, fish, dairy, eggs, and supplemental protein powders.
There are 4 calories per gram of protein.
Carbohydrates: Carbohydrates (carbs) are our body’s main source of energy. Sources of carbs include fruits, vegetables, rice, bread, pasta, oats, and cookies. If you are an active individual, carbs are especially important in keeping you fueled and energized.
There are 4 calories per gram of carbohydrates.
Fat: Fats are an essential part of our diet as they help regulate hormones, absorb vitamins, and can act as an additional energy source. Sources of fat include oils, nuts, avocado, cheese, egg yolks and fattier meat and fish.
There are 9 calories per gram of fat.
Alcohol: Although alcohol is a nonessential part of nutrition, it does contain calories.
There are 7 calories per gram of alcohol.
Why Do People Track Macros?
Tracking your macros can seem like a lot of effort and intimidating, but tracking your food helps you improve awareness of the macros in your food, and in turn helps you create positive eating habits that you can practice throughout your life. Tracking your macros is not just a way to shed a few quick pounds, but rather it’s a practice that allows you to develop a healthier relationship with food, empowers you to make food choices while seeing long term, sustainable results and eliminate food frustrations and unhealthy dieting you’ve had for so long.
Tracking your macros allows you to eat the right amount for you and your goals while also allowing for flexibility to enjoy the foods you love and the lifestyle you want to live.
Getting Started With Tracking Your Macros
Setting your macro targets is dependent on many factors, including your current weight, age, your specific goal, your lifestyle and activity level, and your diet history. Using a macro calculator to determine your targets can be a good place to start, however these online calculators don’t often take the whole picture into account. In general, most goals are either aesthetic (lose body fat/lean out), performance-based (get stronger, improve endurance, gain muscle) or related to overall health (establish healthier eating habits, improve relationship with food, or increase energy). When it comes to setting your targets and tracking, your targets will elicit the types of changes you’re aiming for by putting you in a calorie deficit, a calorie surplus or at maintenance intake.
Calorie Deficit: A calorie deficit is when you are burning more calories than you are eating. If you have aesthetic goals geared towards losing body fat, a calorie deficit is absolutely essential. Being in a calorie deficit should be a temporary phase; because you are eating less, energy and performance may not be optimal, and you may experience some hunger and fatigue. Calorie deficit phases are often cycled with maintenance phases to ensure health and safety as prolonged calorie deficit can affect your physical and mental well-being and run the risk of rebounding in your fat loss journey.
Maintenance Calories: You are at maintenance calories when you are burning as many calories as you are eating, on average. If you want to maintain your current body weight and composition and focus more on overall health, energy, and mood, this is where your focus should be. As mentioned above, maintenance phases are cycled with calorie deficit to give your body and mind a break which will allow for lasting and sustainable fat loss.
Reverse Dieting: Reverse dieting is the phase between calorie deficit and maintenance calories. It’s the process of slowly increasing your calorie intake over the course of weeks/months to prevent or minimize weight gain as you return to your new maintenance calories. Because your body composition and metabolism has changed while being in a deficit, you will have new maintenance calories, so this phase allows you to discover what that is.
Calorie Surplus: A calorie surplus is when you are eating more calories than you are burning. This way of eating is essential if you are wanting to put on weight, especially if you are wanting to build muscle mass. If your goals are geared towards increase strength and improving performance, eating at maintenance calories or in a surplus will be dependent on your training.
Using a food scale, you will weigh your food and track it using an app, like MyFitnessPal or directly into the Thrive app. The goal is to get as close as possible to your target macronutrient numbers each day.With more experience and learning what portion sizes look like, you will be better able to make estimates when it’s not practical to measure or weigh the foods you are eating. Once you are familiar with portion sizes you may only need to periodically weigh and measure your food as a reminder as to what portion sizes look like.
While the process of tracking your macros can sound intimidating at first, it allows you to become more aware of the foods you are eating and becomes easier as you learn how to fuel your body appropriately and find balance in your diet.The great thing is the apps makes it quick and easy to do, provide visual graphs, automatically calculates your macros, calories so all of the guess work or calculating is done for you.