Diet Macros

Just the name itself makes this sound complicated doesn’t it? Well it kind of is. Thankfully the Diet Journal provided in the previous section takes care of most of the math required in setting up your daily macros.

“What the hell is a macro?” you say. In simple terms it is the percentage of calories your protein, carbs and fats make up on a day to day basis compared to your caloric total. For example you may have 30% of your calories come from protien, 50% come from your carbs and 20% come from the fats you eat. To break it down even more if your intake was 2800 calories, 30% of that is 840 calories, 50% is 1400 calories and 20% is 560 calories.

Because protein/carb/fat’s are usually listed in grams and not calories on labels, we need to know how many calories are in each gram.

1 gram of protien = 4 calories

1 gram of carbohydrates = 4 calories

1 gram of fat = 9 calories

So the final calculation of daily intake would look like:

210 grams of protein a day

350 grams of carbs a day

62 grams of fat daily a day

Don’t worry too much about the math, just use the spreadsheet as it lets you change your % ratios on the fly and updates the totals for you.

So what should your macros look like? Well that really depends on how active you are. A fit, highly active adult is probably going to want to stick to the 30/50/20 (protein/carb/fat) macro to keep his energy levels up. A less active person would probably want to lower his carb intake and raise the protein intake to compensate, so maybe a 40/40/20. Finally fat really should be kept under 30% of the total intake because A) 9 calories per gram means you get to eat less and B) Fat is stored as fat in your body immediately, so high fat diets really are not functional unless you are extremely active.

Odds are the protein value is going to be really high compared to what your normally used to. The average diet usually looks closer to a 10/60/30 or even a 10/70/20. And you wonder why there are so many diabetics? I have tried the above macro for about 4 months and began to waste away. I easily lost over 20 lbs of lean muscle over that period of time and looked like I had just escaped a POW camp. A good rule of thumb for intake is 1 gram of protein per lbs of body weight, 2 grams of carbs and about 1/4 gram of fat. I have found that my weight is pretty stable on a 25/55/20 to 30/50/20 macro.

If you are still a little confused on what you should be eating, just check out this partially filled out Diet Journal Example Meal Plans spreadsheet. Hopefully it will give you some ideas on where to start for meals.