Episode 101: Tracking Macros Made Simple

Janine from Couture Fitness Coaching breaks down the essentials of macro tracking in this week's episode of the Booster Metabolism Over Age 30 podcast. She explains why she doesn't follow a strict diet plan but instead focuses on monitoring calories and macronutrients (protein, carbohydrates, and fats). Janine covers how macros are calculated, their importance, and the guidelines set by the Institute of Medicine. She shares personal insights and provides practical tools for tracking macros using apps like MyFitnessPal. The episode emphasizes the importance of food quality and offers actionable advice for building sustainable, healthy eating habits.

00:00 Introduction to the Podcast and Host

00:18 Diving into Nutrition and Diet Plans

01:32 Understanding Macros: The Basics

02:20 Calculating and Setting Your Macros

03:15 Research and Guidelines for Healthy Ranges

04:30 Adjusting Macros for Different Goals

06:41 Importance of Food Quality

07:53 Personal Experience with Macro Tracking

09:51 Tools for Tracking Macros

12:14 Conclusion and Final Thoughts

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Transcript

0:43

Welcome back to the Booster Metabolism Over Age 30 podcast. If you're new here, I'm Janine, a coach at Couture Fitness Coaching, where we help highly driven individuals, learn how to juggle it all. Your health, fitness, career, life, really without sacrificing your goals or burning out. And this week our nutrition episode, we are going to dive into a topic I get asked about all the time. I am often asked, do you follow a specific diet plan, or what exactly do you do for nutrition? The truth is, I don't follow a diet plan in the traditional sense. I don't cut out entire food groups, and I don't believe in strict yes and no lists when it comes to food. What I do is watch my calories and track my macros, and this is the exact same approach that we use with our clients at Couture Fitness Coaching because it's flexible, it's realistic, and honestly most importantly. I believe, and I've seen it with my clients, that it works long term. I want to explain what macro tracking actually is. I wanna share how macros are calculated and why they matter. We're gonna talk about the research behind ideal ranges, cover food quality, and why it's important. I'll share a little bit about my personal story. And finally give you some practical tools you can use to help get started. So let's dive in. What are macros? Macros are short for macronutrients and there are three nutrients that provide us energy, protein, carbohydrates, and fat. And really this is how they add into the calories you eat every day. For every one gram of protein that you consume, you're consuming four calories. For one gram of carbohydrate that you consume, you're consuming four calories. And for one gram of fat that you consume, you are consuming nine calories. So if you look at a nutrition label on the back of the cereal box or your favorite snack, those grams of protein, carbs, and fat is actually what makes up the total calorie number at the top. Say you were instructed to eat 125 grams of protein, 200 grams of carbs, and 56 grams of fat. When you multiply those out, that comes out to about 1800 calories for the day. Your protein gives you 500 of those calories. Your carbs give you 800, and your fat gives you about 500 calories. Now, keep in mind, this is just a general example. I'm not saying you personally should eat these exact numbers because really setting macros is very individual. It depends on your weight, your body composition, your goals, activity level, what your history has been with dieting, even your energy, stress, and sleep. There's lots of factors that go into it, and that's why having a coach to help you kind of cut through all that guesswork can be extremely beneficial. But let's also talk about what research says for just a second. So how do you know you're in a healthy range? This is where nutrition science gives us some guidelines. And the Institute of Medicine developed something called the acceptable macronutrient Distribution ranges, or they also, abbreviate it to A MDR. So these honestly are very broad population level ranges that help reduce the risk of chronic disease while still giving you flexibility in how you eat. And so this is what the Institute of Medicine says. They say that. Your carbs should make up about 45 to 65% of your daily calories, protein 10 and 35, between 10 and 35% of your daily calories and fat between 20 and 35% of your daily calories. Let's be honest, those ranges are pretty wide, aren't they? And that's really intentional. Where you fall within those ranges depends on your goals and your lifestyles. There's lots of factors that go into figuring out where those good thresholds are. Like for where you should be eating based on what your goals are, how you're feeling, things you have going on in your life, et cetera. And what I mean by that is, is there's other things to consider. So if you're lifting weights and you wanna build muscle, you'll wanna be on the higher end of protein, probably closer to like the 25 to 30% of your calories should be consumed, from protein. And honestly, a lot of studies also show that aiming for about, one gram. To two grams of protein per kilogram of body weight, helps optimize muscle building and recovery. If you're training for a marathon or doing a lot of endurance exercise, you probably want carbs at the higher end of that range. So 55 to 65% to make sure you have enough fuel. I'm. Have my sights on running a half marathon at the beginning of next year or the middle to next year. And so I definitely will be considering where my carbohydrate intake is as I start to train for that. And I will make adjustments accordingly and probably eat more carbohydrates than I am right now. It's all based on. What our goals are, what we have going on in our life, things that we're pursuing, et cetera. If you're in a calorie deficit and you're trying to lose weight, a higher protein intake is also important to protect your muscle mass, and to help keep you full and improve your body composition. You know, it's interesting that we have a lot of clients that will often come to us and they, you know, want to, they say they wanna look toned and they wanna have a good toned physique, but. They struggle then with getting their protein up. We have to, we want to build muscle, and then when we go into a calorie deficit, the idea is to be able to shed some fat and reveal those tone muscles that we built when we were eating at higher calories. Well, if we. Drop our protein too much while we're in the calorie deficit, we will see a reduction in muscle mass, right? And so we really wanna preserve that as much as possible when we're in a calorie deficit because we want to, reveal that good, clean, toned look. So really what I'm getting at here is that there's no one size fits all, but these ranges give you a framework. A coach can really help guide you towards what that would look like specifically for you. Now, here's the part I really wanna emphasize about tracking macros. It does not mean that you can just eat ice cream and pizza all day long, as long as it fits in your macros. Yes. Technically with the macro approach, no food is off limits. That's one of the reasons macro tracking is so flexible. It allows for balance and moderation, but the quality of your food still matters. I really have seen this time and time again, clients who hit their macros mostly with whole foods. Things like lean proteins, vegetables, fruit. Whole grains and healthy fats, they look and feel very different than the clients who technically hit their numbers, but do it with mostly processed foods. And the difference also shows up in their energy level. Their digestion, the recovery from their workouts, their mood. And so it consuming whole foods, it really just gives your body the nutrients it needs to perform at its best. So while we say no food is off limits, and I do mean that, but the focus really you want to be doing your best to consume, whole foods nutrient dense foods. I'll be honest, when I started tracking macros about four years ago, it was very hard for me to hit my protein. I had never eaten that much protein probably in my life, or at least not consciously. And for months I felt like I was almost forcing myself to hit 120 grams of protein. But over time my habits shifted and I learned new foods that I enjoyed. I found recipes I liked, and now I. Actually sometimes have to watch that. I don't go crazy and consuming so much protein in a day. I mean, some days I can so easily hit 160 to 170 grams without even trying. But really the point is that macros, macro tracking helps you build better habits. So the goal isn't to track forever. We don't want any of our clients have to track forever. Uh, everybody's different. Some people are gonna say, yeah, I probably will track forever because I like to. Some clients don't wanna track forever, and that really is our ultimate goal. Tracking macros helps you form those healthy habits, right? So it, it helps. It's a, it's a tool or an approach to help you learn how to eat intuitively over time, fueling your body with foods that make you feel good. That help you reach your goals without obsessing over numbers, without obsessing over, I can't eat that right now, but I want that carb so bad, but I'm, I can't have it. I'm not allowed to have it. and so that's, that's one of the reasons why I, I like the macro approach is because it doesn. Put anything off limits. It is to help you form, habits around moderation, and also to help you become very aware of your own body, right? How am I fueling my body? How do I feel when I fuel it that way? And that's also why doing it for a long period of time, can really help you learn when your body feels best, and the foods that you're putting into it, how it can help you feel. Your best and perform your best, right? Have energy to run around with your kids or grandkids, or to go on that bike ride with your spouse or partner or whoever. So let's talk about tools to track your macros real quick. At Couture Fitness, we coach through our app everitt, which integrates with two popular trackers, K Chronometer, and MyFitnessPal. Both K Chronometer and MyFitnessPal have free versions that work really well since I personally use MyFitnessPal. I'm just gonna share a few quick tips. You know, when you get into MyFitnessPal, you can actually set your macro goals. You just have to go. Through a few settings. If you go to more and then go to nutrition, you can toggle over to macros and set those thresholds that you are trying to achieve. The other thing I like about my FitnessPal is that app has a massive food database. So most things you eat are already in there. If not, you can quickly add them manually. So just look at the nutrition label and type it in and save it, and then it's, it continues to grow. So it's there for you in the future when you consume that food again. You also can create and save recipes, which is huge, especially if you cook at home a lot. And the other piece I like about it is if you're scrolling on Pinterest and you find a recipe, or maybe like we talked about last month, you used chat GPT to kind of beef up a recipe or make it a little less, fat. Content or you use chat GPT to reduce the fat content in a recipe that you like or maybe to, add protein to it. You can literally just copy and paste that. Recipe right into the app. Uh, sometimes you have to make a few adjustments, but it will really do a pretty good job at trying to auto calculate the macros for that meal. And then if you're like me and you eat the same breakfast every day or almost every day, you can even create that meal, right? And say, okay, this is my breakfast meal. And log all of those foods in there, save it under your breakfast meal, and then every day it's just one quick tap to log, your breakfast. Each day into the app. And at first, yes, I'll admit tracking macros feels like work. It does take a little bit of time up front, but after a couple weeks it becomes so much easier. The app saves your history and pretty soon logging your meals is quick and painless and eventually down the road. You know, the idea is hopefully that you don't even have to track at all and you just start to know what foods. Are, you know, how much protein is in a chicken breast and how many carbs is in a serving of rice, et cetera. So really just to wrap it all up, I just wanna recap here. Tracking your macros is about balancing protein, carbs, and fats so you can fuel your body and hit your goals and fuel your best. And you know, there is some research out there that gives you healthy ranges, but your exact numbers really depend on you, your individual goals, your lifestyle, what's going on in your life, things like that. Quality also matters, not just trying to hit your numbers, but filling them with mostly whole nutrient dense foods. And also tracking does take a little bit of effort upfront. It pays off in knowledge, habits and results that last, but it does take some time. If you want support figuring out your own macro numbers and learning how to adjust them for fat loss, muscle gain or maintenance, we'd love to help you. That's what we do at Couture Fitness Coaching. You can book a free strategy call with us and we can just talk through what that might look like for you. Because honestly, remember, health and fitness doesn't mean that you have to give up your career, your family, or sanity. You can do all of. Those things and still maintain a healthy lifestyle. And we're here to show you how to do that. So thanks for listening and tuning in. I hope that you learned a little bit in this podcast. And if you have any more questions about macro tracking or you're looking for somebody come alongside you, you know, reach out to us. Book a free strategy call. We would love to have a conversation with you and come alongside you and support you in your goals. Alright everyone, we'll see you next week.