Everything I do with my own nutrition is based on calorie and macronutrient counting. There'll be a future post about how I track calories in terms of the app (spoiler: it's not MyFitnessPal), but this post is designed to break down the basics of calories and macronutrients.
Calories
Calories are the fuel on which your body runs. Overall, they're the one set of numbers that you should always be looking at if you're serious about your nutrition. Whether its weight loss, weight gain, or maintaining weight; calories are important. There are too many 'experts' and nutritional zealots in the industry today proclaiming that calories aren't important. This is complete and utter rubbish. Yes there are schemes that help people to lose weight and they don't mention calories at all. People even lose weight on these schemes, but I guarantee that when they do, they're in a calorie deficit due to restricting some high calorie foods.
Everyone will have their own specific number of calories that is needed for them to gain, lose or maintain weight. Usually these numbers will depend primarily on your height, weight, activity level and age (there are many other factors that can be used to really hone in on those numbers but the ones listed are the basics and good enough to get you a reliable result). If you want a really easy way of calculating your calories, I'd recommend using Carbon. It's essentially like having a virtual coach. You initially give it all of your details such as height, weight, age, activity level and your goal, and it gives you a baseline of calories to aim for. There are also a number of free tools that you can use to calculate these numbers.
The basics behind weight loss, gain or maintenance in terms of calories boils down to the following:
Calories consumed > Calories burned = Weight Gain
Calories burned > Calories consumed = Weight loss
Calories Burned = Calories Consumed = Maintain weight
Macronutrients
So now you have a basic idea of calories, let's talk about the building blocks behind those numbers. Those building blocks are known as macronutrients, or macros for short. They consist of Protein, Fats, and Carbohydrates. Any food with a calorie content will contain a mix of those macronutrients. As calories are calculated through the use of numbers, so are macronutrients. Here's how those numbers look -
Protein - 4 calories per gram
Carbohydrate - 4 calories per gram
Fat - 9 calories per gram
By that logic, 25 grams of carbohydrates would be 100 calories, 25 grams of protein would be 100 calories, and 11 grams of fat would equal 99 calories.
I mentioned Carbon Diet Coach a bit earlier, but if you want an easy way of calculating macros then Carbon is your best bet. There are loads of other free calculators out there though if you'd prefer not to fork out any money.
