I’m going to preface this entire post with I AM NOT A NUTRITIONIST. Honestly, if it weren’t for the instruction from some very smart individuals I’d be flying by the seat of my pants. I do what I’m told. So any of what I say you attempt to make your own, I’d encourage you to research a great coach/trainer/source to figure out what is right for YOUR body. Deal? Deal.
Several of you have asked me via various social platforms what I’ve been up to lately as far as my new health and fitness lifestyle. I’ll talk about the diet part of it today. Last year I dabbled here and there with switching to counting macronutrients rather than calories. At the beginning of this year I made the hard shift to doing so all the time. After years and years and years of low calorie diets, where ALL I did was calculate calories, this was quite an adjustment. When I used to think the calorie was all that mattered, to now realizing it doesn’t matter as much as the CONTENT of the calories ..well, mental struggle.
For those of you that do not know, macronutrients are the parts and pieces that make up our food. Carbohydrates, protein, fat, potassium, magnesium, etc….all these things are macronutrients (or commonly called macros for short.) I track the big 3: carbs, protein, and fat.
I had kinda destroyed my metabolism over time from all the low calorie diets, which is fairly common when doing that type of thing long term. Yes, you temporarily lose weight but your body will adjust, you might be eating calories that really don’t work for the structure of your body, and it’s just not maintainable.
Going into this whole endeavor for me was quite honestly just to lose body fat. I’ve enough body fat to float a barge and it needs to go away. I was at my heaviest in my life. And yes, I realize now more than ever that the number on the scale is really just a number, but even that being said I had/have quite a significant amount of body fat to drop. Your coach/trainer/source will look at your weight/measurements/body fat and determine a starting point for your macros. As I said, I’m not a nutritionist so I can’t explain this fully, but making some levels higher than others will help you gain muscle, while lowering some and raising others increases fat loss, etc. It’s a bit of a puzzle at first because everyone is different and all of our bodies respond differently. My coach understood that I not only wanted to lose fat, but also needed to repair my junky metabolism. So she set my macros and off I went.
I weigh every day. I thought I would obsess over this, but really it isn’t that big of a thing. It’s not really the number that matters. It’s simply a gauge to judge, pretty readily, how my body is responding to adjustments.
Tracking my macros is pretty simple thanks to all the apps these days. I use My Net Diary, which has a website and apps for both iPhone and iPad. I set my current macro targets, and then daily just input my food. Instead of calories, I’m watching my carbs/protein/fat totals. Just like calorie counting you do have to plan a bit. All in all, thanks to the apps, I’m not finding it difficult at all. It only gets tricky when you’re near the end of your day and you have x-number grams of carbs to stuff in. When you have to get just ONE macronutrient, without affecting the others, it can be tricky. You quickly learn some go-to foods to fill the gaps.
I’m in my fourth month of macro tracking, and I’ve had my macros adjusted 3 times. The most recent was just this week. We ADDED more food. We added more food the last time as well. Yes, I’m eating more food, with less exercise, and still losing pounds and inches. No pills, no supplements, no voodoo. Just science. It’s quite fascinating.
If you have any questions that I can legitimately answer, let me know!
We’ll talk about the exercise portion of things another day. 🙂
TODAY I LOVE: really soft t-shirts. It’s like wearing a hug.
