Macronutrients are the building blocks of any diet—proteins, carbohydrates, and fats—and they are where all of your calories come from. Macronutrients supply the energy, fuel, and nutrients you need to live. Each macronutrient serves a specific purpose and should be consumed in the proper amount for optimal health. Quite a few variables come into play when setting up macronutrient ratios, but first, you must understand what they are, what they do, and what foods they come from.
Macronutrients form the basis of any nutrition plan. Regardless of whether you follow a strict diet plan or just eat whatever you feel like, you take in macronutrients every single day. Without an adequate macronutrient intake, your body would stop working. The amount of macronutrients in a given food determines how many calories are in that food. By figuring out exactly how many macronutrients your body needs each day and then eating just that balanced amount, you can achieve your health and weight loss goals.
To understand macronutrients, you need a very basic understanding of how your body operates. Every single process your body goes through every day, from brushing your teeth to digesting food and even breathing, requires energy. You may not feel physically tired from sitting on the couch watching television, but even the simple act of staying alive requires a little bit of energy. Your body gets the energy it needs from calories. Some foods have quite a few calories while some have very little, but all foods contain calories, even if they are found in very small amounts.
If you have a very active lifestyle, your body will use or “burn” a greater number of calories to function every day. Activities that make you feel physically tired, like running, playing sports, yard work, or significant walking, will burn more calories than sitting around doing nothing.
The human body is very smart. It can survive without food for weeks at a time under extreme circumstances, and it’s a very complex operating system. Your body uses energy every single day, but it also stores energy. Your body has a built-in storage system that allows it to save excess energy for a later time when you don’t receive enough from food. Energy is stored in adipose cells, also known as body fat.
That’s right—that fat on your body contains stored energy, ready to be used when there isn’t enough provided by the food you eat. Adipose tissue (body fat) provides some protection and insulation for your body, but at the end of the day, it’s nothing more than stored energy.
Eating more calories does not necessarily cause fat gain. If you’re an athlete or work a physical job, you need to be eating extra calories just to function.
The problem lies in excess calorie consumption. If you regularly eat more calories than your body burns in a day, that excess energy needs to go somewhere, and most of it will be stored as body fat. If you eat fewer calories than your body needs, you’ll end up using some of your stored fat for energy, decreasing your body fat stores.
Later in this book, you’ll learn all the details and calculations to figure out exactly how many calories you should be eating, but for now you just need to understand the basics of calories and body fat. At the end of the day, too many calories will lead to fat gain and too few will lead to fat loss. Fat loss has many intricacies and details, but at its most basic level, fat loss is nothing more than an energy equation.
Calories come from macronutrients, and there are three different macronutrients, or macros for short. They are protein, carbohydrates, and fats. Each of these macros play a unique role in how your body functions. If fat loss and body composition were a pyramid, total calories would form the base of that period, as that is the most important factor. However, the next level would be the actual quantities of macronutrients you consume each day.
You must have a proper balance of the three macros. Having too much or too little of any of the three will lead to less than optimal health and body functioning, as all three play important roles, and none of them are bad or evil. You’ll learn to figure out your exact macronutrient needs later in this book, as the required levels of each will vary based on your goals.
It’s worth mentioning that carbohydrates are the only nonessential macronutrient. You may feel miserable if you remove them completely from your diet, but assuming your protein and fat intake is correct, you won’t suffer any dangerous side effects. If your protein or fat levels drop too low, you’ll be looking at some real health problems, but you can live without carbohydrates. Removing them completely is an extreme form of dieting and not sustainable for most people, but it’s a viable option if you really want to try it.
All calories come from the macronutrients found in food, which are carbohydrates, proteins, and fats. All of these macronutrients give you the calories you need to survive.
Carbohydrates, or carbs for short, come from starchy foods like potatoes and rice and some other fruits and vegetables. They are the body’s preferred source of energy as they provide a quick form of energy. Where protein and fats are slow to digest, and not used as easily for energy, stored carbohydrates are very easy for your body to digest and use for energy. When you need a fast energy supply, you don’t want to mess around with proteins and fats, which digest slowly. Every gram of carbohydrate contains four calories.
All carbohydrates are broken down into molecules of glucose or fructose, which are simple sugar molecules. Plain table sugar? That’s a carbohydrate. So are oatmeal, potatoes, rice, cucumbers, fruit juices, and many other common foods. You may hear people talk about “good carbs” or “bad carbs,” but at the end of the day, all carbohydrates end up in the same place.
Carbohydrates are broken down and stored throughout the body in the form of glycogen, mainly in the muscles and liver. Glycogen is a readily available fuel source for your body, particularly for high-intensity activities. If you’re playing sports, exercising, or doing anything physically active, your body is most likely using stored glycogen to fuel those activities.
Proteins are made up of amino acids, which are the building blocks of most of the cells in the human body. Without amino acids, you’d be unable to replace the skin cells you lose every day, grow hair and fingernails, or rebuild and repair damaged muscle tissue. Proteins are essential for optimal health and body functioning. Every gram of protein has four calories.
Protein comes from meat, fish, eggs, dairy products, and some lentils, such as soybeans. It’s often consumed as a dietary supplement in powdered form, particularly among those who regularly exercise.
Fat rounds out the trio of key macronutrients and, like protein, it is essential to live. The right kinds of fat support healthy joints, cellular health, heart health, brain functioning, mood, and a whole host of other functions in the body. Unlike carbohydrates and proteins, however, certain fats are less than stellar and should be avoided for the most part. Whereas carbs and proteins each have four calories per gram, fat has nine calories per gram.
Dietary fat is simply another form of energy and nutrition; it does not directly correlate at all to actual body fat. The right fats supply the body with energy, help it retain crucial vitamins that require fat for absorption, protect the organs, and encourage healthy skin and hair.
The unfortunate reality is that you’re probably going to have to track your food intake at some point. When you’re just getting started with a healthy eating plan, it may be enough to clean up your diet by eliminating soda, fast food, candy, and other foods that would typically be considered “bad.”
This won’t last forever. Eventually you’re going to have to track and measure what you’re eating, at least for a while. The closer you get to your goal weight, the harder it will be, and you’ll really have to know exactly what’s going in your body to continue making progress. With that being said, what should you be tracking? Calories or macros?
Well, you already know that calories come from macros. By definition, if you are tracking your macronutrients, you’ll always know exactly how many calories you’ve consumed that day. It doesn’t go both ways, however, as tracking calories alone isn’t going to show you the exact macronutrient breakdown you’re consuming.
If you’re just getting started with food tracking, start by simply tracking total calories. This is easier to learn, and it’ll build a good habit of paying attention to what you eat and what’s in your food. Once you have this down, you can move on to tracking the specific macros you’re consuming.
You may be wondering, if macros are proteins, carbohydrates, and fats, where do are all of those vitamins and minerals come from? Surely those are important?
The important nutritional value your food provides comes from micronutrients. These are the vitamins and minerals that allow your body to function at an optimal level. They are only required in small amounts, which is why they are called micronutrients, but they are very important.
Your body is capable of hundreds of internal functions, with many of them happening simultaneously. Even something as simple as breathing requires the coordinated efforts of several different systems and muscles in your body.
If you are missing micronutrients in your diet, your health will suffer. Vitamins and minerals are essential for proper growth, energy levels, metabolism, and a whole host of other functions. For optimal health levels, you should be consuming a wide variety of micronutrients in your diet every single day.
Nutrient-dense foods are the ones that provide the most nutritional value and should be a main staple of your diet. Foods like fruits, vegetables, lean proteins, whole grains, and healthy fats are all necessary to ensure you’re getting the vitamins and minerals your body needs to run at 100 percent efficiency.
While it’s possible to change your body composition with any sort of food you’d like, assuming the calories add up, your overall health is far more important than the number on the scale. You may think you’re cheating the system if you try to get all of your daily calories from foods that are lacking in micronutrients, but this isn’t ideal if you care about your long-term health.
Now that you know you need vitamins and minerals, it’s time to look at what food sources supply them. There are many vitamins and minerals, so your best bet is to try and get a variety of fruits and vegetables every day and opt for whole, unprocessed foods whenever you can. Think the meat, eggs, and produce sections, not the packaged stuff in the middle aisles of the supermarket.
While covering every single vitamin and mineral and where it comes from is beyond the scope of this book, it’s important to highlight some of the more important ones. The following seven micronutrients are some of the more important vitamins and minerals that play a massive role in staying healthy, and you should try to get them in your diet every single day.
The last thing to mention is the importance of using whole foods to meet your micronutrient goals rather than relying solely on supplements. While there are many different supplements on the market that offer vitamin and mineral support, nothing beats the nutritional value of whole foods. Supplements can be a good safety net, but if that’s your only source of these micros, you’re not going to see the full benefit of consuming them. Whole foods contain natural combinations of these vitamins and minerals so they can work together in your body to be even more effective, which is a benefit individual supplements are unable to replicate.
Vitamin D is the sunshine vitamin and is most commonly associated with mood and happiness. It’s produced when your skin is exposed to sunlight on a regular basis, and a deficiency in vitamin D can lead to weak bones, depression, mood swings, rickets, cardiovascular problems, and many more issues. Although our bodies can produce vitamin D naturally, direct exposure to sunlight on a daily basis is required to initiate the natural production process, something many people don’t get enough of.
The best food sources for vitamin D are fatty fish, egg yolks, foods fortified with added vitamin D, or a supplement. If you are going to take a vitamin D supplement, be sure to check with your doctor first to figure out the right dosage for you as it’s a fat-soluble vitamin that can accumulate in your system if you take more than your body can process.
Vitamin C is one that almost everybody knows as the immune system booster. When you start to get sick, you take extra vitamin C. While taking extra vitamin C when you’re feeling under the weather can help strengthen your immune system, it’s important to make sure you’re getting enough even on the days when you aren’t feeling sick. A lack of vitamin C has been linked to scurvy, a weak immune system, the tendency to bruise easily, and joint and muscle pain.
You can get vitamin C from oranges, kiwis, pineapple, papaya, kale, and various peppers. Eating a wide variety of fruits and vegetables every day is a good way to make sure you’re getting plenty of this essential vitamin.
There are several different types of vitamin B, but they all do the same thing. These are water-soluble vitamins, which means they can be absorbed and utilized without relying on dietary fat.
B vitamins help with cellular metabolism. They assist your body in absorbing the food you eat and using it for energy. These vitamins are also important for the formation of red blood cells, which transport oxygen to the various parts of your body.
You can supplement with vitamin B complexes or you can obtain them from whole-food proteins like meat, fish, eggs, and leafy green vegetables.
Vitamin K is another fat-soluble vitamin that must be consumed with some dietary fat for your body to absorb it. Its most important role is in aiding with the formation of blood clots. If you cut yourself, you want your blood to form a clot as quickly as possible to stop the bleeding—a deficiency in vitamin K will make this very difficult.
Foods high in vitamin K include spinach, asparagus, broccoli, lentils, eggs, and meats. If you’re eating a well-rounded diet that includes a variety of fruits and vegetables, you’re probably getting enough vitamin K. If you don’t eat many vegetables, you might want to consider eating more or supplementing with vitamin K.
Magnesium is a mineral found in dark leafy greens like spinach and kale, in addition to certain nuts. As researchers are learning more about this mineral, it’s becoming quite clear that it’s one of the most important minerals you can consume, and magnesium deficiency is becoming a dangerous epidemic.
Most leafy greens used to be very high in magnesium, but as modern farming methods have changed, the nutritional content of plants has started to decline. Magnesium deficiency can cause muscle cramping, muscle spasms, hormonal issues, high blood pressure, mood swings and depression, anxiety, lack of energy, and problems sleeping. It’s extremely important to consume optimal levels of magnesium, and unless you are eating a lot of leafy greens every day, a supplement may be beneficial as a nutritional insurance.
Potassium is an electrolyte, which is a mineral that helps your body send signals through the muscles. Without adequate potassium, your body’s nerves may not function properly, and you may experience muscle cramping or twitching and have difficulty contracting your muscles the proper way. Because your body loses electrolytes when you sweat, it’s important to get plenty of potassium in your diet if you lead an active life.
It is possible to have too much potassium, but a healthy liver will remove any excess potassium from your blood. Eating potassium-rich foods like bananas, spinach, squash, and avocados is the best way to ensure you are getting enough from natural food sources. If you tend to sweat a lot and notice muscle cramps during exercise, you may want to consume an electrolyte drink during your workouts to stay hydrated.
Of all the minerals found in your body, calcium is the one you have in the greatest abundance, and up to 99 percent of it is stored in your bones and teeth. Beyond supporting a strong skeletal system, calcium also plays an important role in blood vessel and muscular contractions, as well as in the production of certain hormones and enzymes.
Calcium is primarily found in dairy products, so including milk, yogurt, and cheese in your diet is a good way to make sure you’re getting enough calcium. It’s also found in some dark leafy greens and can be supplemented if you follow a vegan diet that doesn’t allow any dairy product intake.