How do you know your macros? Do you plan what you eat?

(Liz Santiago) #1

How do I know what are the macros I should be eating? How do I calculate that?
Another question, if you were to have the following goals and you have not had dinner yet how do you know what to eat that for example in this case gets you to eating 397 cal but only has 2 carb , 33g of fat and 18 g of protein?
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(Bob M) #2

Two of the many reasons I don’t track.

(Pete A) #3

Yes I plan what I will eat based on macros.

Speaking to the goals you listed I would shoot for that during the day. As far as your specific macros, you would have to find calculators online and play with that. You have the opportunity to enter your own stats…

Here’s an example but there are tons of other sites:

(Allie) #4

Nope, just count carbs if you need to count something.
I count nothing now, just avoid carbs as much as possible.

(You've tried everything else; why not try bacon?) #5

The main goal is to lower insulin by keeping carb intake as low as necessary. If you are insulin-resistant, you will need to eat less carbohydrate, possibly even less than the 20 g/day maximum we recommend. If you are insulin-sensitive, you might be able to eat more carbohydrate and still be in ketosis. As for the rest of what you eat, we recommend eating enough protein and fat to keep your muscles from wasting and to satisfy your hunger.

It worked for me, anyway. I lost 80 lbs./36 kg by not counting calories and keeping carb intake as low as possible.

(Bob M) #6

The post illustrates why I have such difficulty with macros. Let’s say she (or he?) eats 400 calories of ham. You CANNOT meet the fat “macro” with ham. Yet she could be full and feel fine.

And why do I say this? Because my go to if I’m still hungry at night is often ham. But if I HAD to meet a “macro”, it wouldn’t be.

Maybe pepperoni? But when I ate a higher fat diet with things like pepperoni, I gained weight, not lost it.

(Marianne) #7

Back when I first started, I got my macros off of ketokarma.com. They have a free calculator. I had no idea what I was doing back then and tracked my macros for about three weeks. After that and being an active member here, I ditched tracking anything and just made sure to keep my carbs under 20g/day. I did that by eating a salad or vegetable only at our evening meal (usually steamed brussels sprouts in butter, sometimes a romaine salad with homemade blue cheese dressing). The rest of the time, I only consumed meat and some cheese. I never “planned” our meals, per se, but would just take some meat out of the freezer in the morning for dinner and pull what I could from the fridge to eat for a mid-day meal. I usually only ate two meals a day and still do now. I have found that keto can be so simple. We eat so well with minimal cooking and no planning. I don’t think about food during the day or miss the things I don’t eat any more. Good luck to you.

#8

You can’t. I experimented a lot to figure out what my body needs/wants.
And these things even changed a lot. There was a time when 80g net carbs was ideal for me but eventually I could go lower and it turned out it’s better :wink:
I surely will change more but I suppose mostly just due to my energy need. But we will see.

Even if you can’t be sure, you can make an educated guess and figure out your starting point.

Well this is the situation where I always pitied the common CICOers… Or anyone else who focus this insanely much on macros. Not lifelike. Sure, if you have an idea and that happen to fit the remaining numbers, great, do it but I saw people crying that they are hungry or they so want to drink a little milk but only a few grams left…

It’s so not human-like to have exactly some fixed target macros. I have some idea about what a good day looks like now but going over my macros a bit (or under if it’s okay. my body almost never accepts a smaller than target protein intake) is fine. Or a lot if I have a good reason to do so. Like, hunger. Unusually high desire to eat meat galore. These things.

I wouldn’t care about the numbers sooo much. The question is if I am hungry, if I need fuel and what and how much exactly. If only 500g fatty meat would satiate me, I would eat that, numbers be damned… If it means overeating for that day, I try to plan better next time (but after such a well-fed day I expect a good one). I choose my food to fit to my idea of a good day but I do my best to give my body what it wants. That has priority, not the macro numbers.

I probably would eat some fatty meat and/or eggs and some very fatty dairy if I wanted to eat according to those macros. If I only need a bit more food for the day, it’s not even impossible to pull off such a meal though I rarely eat so small ones. But I always track after my day so I do my days blindly. But if my timing and food choice is really, really good (hard to do but with experience and determination even I have such great days quite often), my macros are fine too.

And if I had to eat only 1200 kcal, I would eat it all for dinner. Expect it’s too small for my OMAD dinner. Okay I stop, why I try to answer when I am a very different person with a very different view about adequate calories and protein…?

(Edith) #9

I kept track of my macros for my first year or so when I started eating low carb. I realized after a while it was too stressful and tiresome constantly having to measure what I was eating, plugging recipes into MyFitnessPal to figure out macros in homemade foods, etc.

With that being said, if you only worry about counting the macros for the carbs, especially for fruit and veggies, that is easy. So, I would suggest, like the others, count your carbs and then eat fatty meat: 80/20 ground beef, beef chuck, chicken thighs instead of breast, fatty pork chops/pork shoulder roast instead of pork loin. If you can eat butter and your protein is lean, you can always up the fat by adding butter.

Keeping meals simple also makes keeping track of the carb macro easy. If you are eating meat and eggs, then you can assume 0 carbs for those food. Two cups of lettuce, a cucumber, broccoli are easy to determine if you keep them as single sides.

If you don’t want to use a tracker such as MyFittnessPal or Chronometer (sp ?), this website provides not only macro information for different foods, but their micronutrients, as well.
https://nutritiondata.self.com/

Fatty meat and veggies. It is very easy and saves time making complicated recipes. I did a carnivore stint for a while and it ruined me for cooking. It was sooooo easy only having to cook meat all the time, I just couldn’t t go back to making fancy recipes. For me, its just meat and a serving of fruit or vegetable.

(You've tried everything else; why not try bacon?) #10

The U.S. Department of Agriculture also has food data here.

(Liz Santiago) #11

are those net carb or total carb?

(Allie) #12

Personal preference depending how your body responds.

(Jane) #13

My understanding of the keto diet is:

Carbs are a max (try to keep under 20 and your choice of counting net or total)

Protein is a min - 1.2 to 1.7 g per kg of NORMAL body weight (not what you weigh now), For me that is around 90 g or protein per day.

Fat is NOT a min and no need to force fat. Just eat enough with your meals that you aren’t hungry in between meals and have enough energy.

That being said - I only tracked net carbs in the beginning to get the hang of it. I ate enough protein to satisfy me and didn’t add any extra fat other than what I cooked with - other than my morning coffee has butter in it, which it didn’t have before keto. I plugged in a couple of typical days into Chronometer to make sure i was eating enough protein and I was.

It worked for me. If you need more “rules” or “structure” you might consider joining Diet Doctor for a few months and have them provide you with meal plans. I have never used them but some here have had success with them.

I never used a macro calculator - just followed what I posted above.

(Liz Santiago) #14

but that is not the same because if you count 20 net could be 30 total or 35. I don’t understand.

(Liz Santiago) #15

How do I know how much protein I should eat?

(You've tried everything else; why not try bacon?) #16

That’s right. And it is why some people feel that is better for them to limit themselves to 20 total.

The carb limit is somewhat arbitrary, but it will get almost everyone into ketosis. Once you are fat-adapted, you can experiment to see what your actual carb threshold is. If you care, by that point, that is; many people have found that by the time they were fat-adopted, they no longer wanted much carbohydrate, anyway. And carb addicts find that the less carbohydrate they eat, the less they crave.

I can’t believe we didn’t mention this already! I’m so sorry! We recommend between 1.0 and 1.5 g of protein per kilo of lean body mass per day, up to 2.0 g/kg, if you need a lot of protein.

And don’t forget that meat is roughly a quarter protein, so multiply by 4 to get the grams of meat you need. Or if you are working in ounces, figure that an ounce of meat has roughly 7 g of protein.

(Liz Santiago) #17

Let me see if I got this correctly. If I weight 212lb but the fat free is 102.6 in kilos is 45.26x1.5= 69g of protein to eat in a day?

(Megan) #18

45 kg seems quite low, how tall are you?

69g of protein a day isn’t a lot.

(Liz Santiago) #19

5’2

(Liz Santiago) #20

I don’t even get there