SS 195 – Exactly How to Calculate Your Macros For Fat Loss

Episode 195 Show Notes

In today’s episode, Grant and Heavey specifically teach you how to count your individual macros if you’re trying to lose fat. How is macro counting applicable to other diets? Lastly, they factor in non-intentional physical activity into the equation (which could very likely be the cause why people are not achieving the amount of fat loss they want to hit even if they’re on a calorie deficit.)

 

[01:12] Breaking News!

 

The Boiling Crab uses margarine in their sauce, and by now, you probably know that margarine is often made with partially hydrogenated vegetable oils – trans fats. Most trans fats are bad. Grant stopped eating there and developed his own recipe. In the process, he discovered that there is actually margarine that doesn’t have any trans fats.

 

Grant mentions an article from the MayoClinic about which spread is better – butter or margarine? It mentions that margarine usually tops butter when it comes to heart health. The exception is the types that contain trans fats. How can you tell? The more solid the margarine, the more trans fat it contains.

 

So if you’re under the impression that margarine is 100% bad because of the trans fats, then you might try to check its content next time.

 

[05:35] How to Not Be Fat: Count Your Macros

 

Heavey points out that people love talking about macros when it comes to fat loss. There are different factors involved here.

 

If you’re looking to lose fat by going through a caloric deficit, then that’s going to affect how you calculate macros. On the other hand, you may want to hold on to your muscle mass while losing fat, and that will affect your macros as well.

 

By calculating macros, start by calculating calories. If you’re trying to eat for performance for Crossfit, you might need to modify those percentages for that athletic endeavor. But if you’re trying to optimize for fat loss, then you may need to alter those percentages.

 

[07:35] How to Calculate Your Macros: The Harris Benedict

 

Start with total calories. For fat loss, know what your maintenance calories are. Although you can’t know the exact calculation unless you subject yourself to a lab, you can estimate your calories in different ways. So just pick one like the Harris Benedict, the most well-known calculation. It doesn’t estimate your daily caloric burn, rather it computes your Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR). It’s like your resting energy. The more active you are in the day, the more calories you burn.

 

On top of that, you’re burning other calories. For instance, apply an activity factor to your BMR.

 

With so many gray areas here since there are different levels of physical activity, Heavey suggests that you come up with your best guess. Don’t obsess over it. Pick something. Go with it, and then measure how your body is responding.

 

[10:00] How to Calculate Your Macros: Alan Aragon’s Equation

 

Heavey finds that the simplest, most effective method he has come across is one developed by Alan Aragon, a nutritional researcher. His equation:

 

Multiply 10 by your target weight + the number of hours you’re exercising in a week times your target weight.

 

For instance, your target body weight is 200 pounds and work out for 4 hours total in a week. (200×10) + (200×4) This would set your target calorie rate at 2,800 calories per day. This is how much calories you need to eat per day.

 

So if you’re 180 pounds, the idea is that will put weight on you; and if you’re 225 pounds, it will take the weight off of you since the latter burns more calories just by existing.

 

Heavey thinks all this is being lost in the noise. They’re all estimates anyway so let’s not worry about it too much. Do something simple and see how your body is responding.

 

[12:05] How Can You Sustain This If You Have a Super Varied Lifestyle?

 

Heavey also points out the fact that for some people hitting the same calorie target per day is a challenge, especially if you have a lifestyle that doesn’t follow routine. In the case that you have to attend many events or you have kids and are constantly going to birthday parties.  What you can do is take that daily calorie goal and translate it into a weekly calorie goal. You can ffind a lot of success from doing this.

 

Therefore, you don’t need to obsess over hitting that mark each day if that’s not really working for your lifestyle. You can take the 2,800 and multiply it by 7 and set that as your weekly goal. Heavey finds this as a legitimate approach.

 

With cheat meals, you could still be erasing all of your work from the week. But if you are still measuring and having a concept of control, then this approach can still work for you. Grant adds that you can’t just go completely crazy, right?

 

[14:00] Does This Apply to Whatever Diet You’re On?

 

If you’re using macros, it doesn’t set what you use for your food components, as long as you hit the macro numbers.

 

In principle, a Paleo diet is not looking at the number of calories you’re consuming per day. Technically, you could do a hybrid Paleo-macro approach where you can use the macros but you’re only going to use paleo food sources. In the same way, you could be counting macros and be on a Ketogenic diet. It’s simply a framework of counting your calories and setting percentages for types of food.

 

[14:44] The Benefits of Counting Your Macros vs. Just Watching Calories

 

If you’re just watching your calories, you’re not looking at the types of foods you’re consuming. Especially if you want to keep your lean muscle mass and just focus on fat loss, then how much protein you’re consuming makes a big difference. At the bottom end of that, there are about 0.7 grams of protein per pound of body weight. So you don’t want to go below that if you’re trying to hold on to your muscle mass while losing fat.

 

As Heavey mentioned in previous episodes, he still thinks that a good goal to shoot for is the one gram per pound per day. So if you have a 200-pound goal, if you can get to 200 grams, that would be very helpful for you. This gives you a better chance of preserving your muscle mass. Plus, protein is the most satiating macronutrient that keeps you full longer than all the other macros. This is important when you’re trying to lose weight. Additionally, you burn more calories trying to absorb protein.

 

[16:30] Should You Rather Eat 95% Protein?

 

Heavey explains there are some studies that look at very high protein levels which were found to be safe. But if you try to consume 90% – or even just 50% – of your diet from protein, you start to run into issues with compliance. The same goes for carbs.

 

There is a lot of hype around low carb approaches, especially keto. People who try it reduce their carbs to almost nothing. The problem is that so many people have a hard time sticking to a very low carb diet. So they tend to do it aggressively for two weeks and then fall off and give up because they didn’t get their results. So if you try to stick to an ultra high protein diet, you probably would suffer the same consequences.

 

[17:40] Low Carb Diet: Can You Sustain It? Really?

 

One review looked at a bunch of very low carb studies and found that only one out of six of those studies where they were restricting participants to less than 50 grams of carbohydrate per day were they able to maintain compliance. It’s a very small percentage of the population that can adhere to that kind of diet over the long-term.

 

If you were to adjust that number up to a lower carbohydrate allocation (but not “keto low”) of 130 grams, the compliance rate went way up.

 

Heavey stresses that worrying about carbohydrates is something that undoes a lot of people’s diets. And after talking about protein, carb and fat percentages don’t really matter if fat loss is your only goal.

 

You can mix and match fats and carbs as much as you want as long as you’re hitting your protein and staying underneath your calorie target.

 

[20:17] The Beauty of Mixing Food

 

When you consume foods with a high glycemic index, this will trigger an insulin response. But if you’re mixing that with other foods like proteins and carbs, that greatly diminishes the response to that food.

 

Additionally, much of the research where people are looking at insulin and obesity, have found that this happens as a result of eating a shitty caloric excess diet. But when it comes to fat loss, if you’re under your maintenance calorie levels and you have normal functioning metabolisms, you’re not going to have any issues like that.

 

[21:30] Calories In, Calories Out: Does This Work?

 

With regards to the concept of “calories in, calories out,” it means the conservation of energy, which is a law of the universe. But it’s more complex than that, once they’re in our body.

 

There are roughly 3500 calories in a pound of fat. There’s this idea being thrown around that you just take your maintenance calories minus 500 and over a week, you’d be at a 3500-calorie deficit so you will lose one pound per week and that’s how you diet. But this doesn’t really work, which means that you didn’t really lose one pound at the end of the week. This is the point people think “calories in, calories out” doesn’t work. This is because there are many variables that influence it. Not to mention, how much messier this gets when we talk about energy expenditure.

 

Moreover, the body weight affects it too. As you diet and you lose one pound per week per instance, your body weight is changing. So your maintenance level of calories is always going to be changing in response to that.

 

Another variable is that when you’re lighter, your response to exercise changes. So the amount you’re burning as you get lighter becomes less. This is one thing that affects the “calories out” piece.

 

[25:00] Do You Like to Move It, Move It? (Well, You Should!)

 

The last element would be the non-exercise activity like walking around, fidgeting, and all other stuff you’re doing where you’re moving that’s not intentional exercise. One of the key pieces why people don’t lose fat when they’re on a caloric deficit is because their body has this built-in mechanism to down-regulate energy. Your body signals you to not move around as much in the hope to preserve energy.

 

There’s a study where people were overfed by 1000 calories per day for 8 weeks. At the end of the study, the amount of fat gain across all participants varied by as much as a factor of ten. In theory, everybody should have gained the exact amount of weight. They found that the activity level of some people increases dramatically. At the high end, there were people spending an additional 700 calories per day by being active outside of intentional exercise. So 70% of the extra energy they were getting was being expended unintentionally.

 

On the flip side, the person that gained the most weight moved less after eating the 1000 extra calories per day. So the study shows that the body is responding very strongly to the amount of calories you’re consuming and your daily activity.

 

If your goal is fat loss, it’s important to track your activity level because of this unintentional movement reduction. Most people have the opportunity to get up every so often at work and move a little bit. A lot of people get discouraged when they don’t lose fat while they’re eating on a caloric deficit, and it’s because of this. Hence, activity trackers are so beneficial.

 

[31:53] The Simple Math Behind the Macros

 

Going back to the 200-pound guy used earlier as an example, his calorie target based on Alan Aragon’s equation is 2800 calories per day. His protein target is set at one gram per day. That’s 200 grams of protein. And protein has 4 calories per gram, so that makes it 800 calories.

 

Again, you can be flexible with fats and carbohydrates. But there’s a good minimum you can use to adhere to fat where you shouldn’t go below 20% of calories for fat. So we take those 2800 calories times 20%, that’s 560 calories. 560 divided by 9 (since there are 9 calories per gram of fat) equals 62 grams of fat. Subtracting these from 2,800, that leaves us with 1,440 calories left, which can be in the form of carbs. Or you can change it up however you want – all fat, all carbs, or split them 50-50.

 

Some people get hung up on macro allocations when they don’t need to. If one day you have a higher fat day, do that. Be fluid with it. As long as you’re hitting your protein and calorie target then you should be fine. Simple, isn’t it?

 

Grant breaks it further down for you:

Step 1: Figure your target weight.

Step 2: Figure out your caloric goal based on the equation (10 plus the number of hours of exercise times your target weight)

Step 3: Figure out the protein amount which is equal to your target weight.

Step 4: Then 20% of the daily calories have to be fat.

Step 5: Add those two together (fat+ protein), and what’s left is spread to however you want it.

Again, track your activity and try to keep it high. Run the math and then you’re going to be successful when it comes to fat loss.

Links:

Which Spread is Better for My Heart – Butter or Margarine?