If you’re doing keto, one of the first things you should come to understand is all about macros.
What are they and how will they help you reach your goals?
How do macros differ from calories? And are they really that important?
Let’s go over all these details and more so that you are in-the-know when it comes to this buzzword you hear all the time.
What Are Macros?
When it comes to your diet plan, all the foods you eat will provide calories. Calories are a unit of energy that helps fuel every single reaction taking place in your body each day. We all need calories to survive.
Now, each food that contains calories also contains macronutrients and micronutrients.
Macronutrients are the energy-providing nutrients and can be broken down into carbohydrates, proteins, and fats. You’ve probably heard these words being tossed around from time to time.
Micronutrients on the other hand don’t provide calories and are all the vitamins and minerals that you consume on a day to day basis.
They call them micronutrients because you only take in small amounts of them (oftentimes, less than one gram per day), while macronutrients are called as such because you take in much larger quantities.
In order for you to stay well and healthy, you should be consuming all the macronutrients to some degree, although they have their varying requirements.
Let’s look further at the macronutrients now so you can put the pieces of the puzzle together.
Dietary Fats
Finally, dietary fat is another energy-providing nutrient for the body.
While carbs are generally the type of fuel your body runs most naturally on, you can train your body to run off fats, as you do in the ketogenic diet.
When you do, you’ll often come to find that it runs better than ever and you feel great using fat as fuel.
Fats are also important for regulating your hormones as well, so that’s another important role they provide in the body [2].
They also help with the absorption of the fat-soluble vitamins – vitamin A, D, E, and K, so it’s important that you are taking in enough so you don’t fall deficient.
One key difference between fats and carbohydrates you should note however is that fats contain 9 calories per gram compared to just the 4 that carbohydrates provide.
This said, fats are excellent for controlling hunger levels and keeping your blood glucose levels stable, so you’ll likely find that after eating them, you maintain excellent control over your food intake for hours ahead.
We recommend consuming 75% of your macros from fat.
Protein
Protein is the only one of the macronutrients to have firmly recommended intake guidelines. Protein is the macronutrient that provides the structural building blocks that help your body repair and rebuilds tissue cells, so as you can imagine, it's pretty important to your overall success.
Those who aren’t getting enough protein in their daily diet often find they fail to recover between workout sessions, may suffer from lean muscle mass loss, and may also notice their immune system is getting weaker and weaker as well.
Whenever you eat protein-rich food, it will break down into what’s called amino acids, some of which can be created within the body from other foods that you are eating.
Nine of these amino acids however are essential, meaning you must consume them in specific food sources in order to not fall deficient.
These amino acids include:
- histidine
- isoleucine
- leucine
- lysine
- methionine
- phenylalanine
- threonine
- tryptophan
- valine
You can find protein in foods such as chicken, turkey, lean beef, fish, seafood, eggs, dairy products, keto meal replacement, whey protein powder, collagen protein, as well as in vegetarian based sources such as beans and lentils and soy-based foods.
Keep in mind that vegetarian protein sources typically also contain relatively high amounts of carbohydrates and/or dietary fats as well. So you have to factor those into your diet plan also.
When you are eating food, you are rarely ever getting 100% of one single macronutrient but typically get the macronutrients in combination with each other.
How much protein do you need?
On keto, you should aim for 20% or less of your macros to be from protein. Any more than 20% and you may accidentally kick yourself out of ketosis through gluconeogenesis.
Generally speaking, it’s a good idea to get in at least 0.7-0.8 grams per pound of body weight if you are trying to maintain your body weight.
If you are on a reduced-calorie diet, you’ll want to take in a bit more to preserve lean muscle mass, so you should bump this up to 0.8-1.2 grams instead.
Keep in mind that every gram of protein you eat contains four calories.
Carbohydrates
Next, you have carbohydrates. On keto, the goal is to keep carbs to 5% or less of your total calories.
Carbs supply dietary fiber, which is a nutrient that helps add bulk to your diet and moves food and waste through your system properly.
Dietary fiber also helps to reduce cholesterol levels and slows down the release of carbohydrates into the bloodstream, so can help you control blood glucose levels better.
Dietary fiber is a type of carbohydrates, however, unlike regular carbohydrates that contain four calories per gram, dietary fiber contains just two.
Examples of complex carbohydrates to avoid on keto include:
- oats
- sweet potatoes
- brown rice
- quinoa
- Ezekiel bread
Examples of simple carbohydrates to avoid on keto include:
- white bread
- regular potatoes
- crackers
- granola bars
- sugar cereals
- candy
- cakes
- cookies
Many people in their diet will count net carbs, which are essentially only those carbs that impact blood glucose levels [1]. To get this, you subject the total fiber content from the total carb content and now you have your net carb balance.
Again on keto, we recommend taking your intake down very low to 5% of total calories range, which for most people is about 15-20 net grams per day.
How many you eat is up to you but you must note that it must balance out with your fat intake, which we’ll discuss next.
So there you have the main points to know and remember about macros. If you can master macros, you are well on your way to mastering your diet plan.
If you want to calculate your macros the easy way, check out our easy-to-use keto macro calculator!
PS - Want the easy way to get perfect macros with a delicious chocolate shake?
As well as satisfying your hunger, sugar cravings, and more? Check out our Keto Meal Replacement here.
References:
- Rothman, Russell L., et al. “Patient understanding of food labels: the role of literacy and numeracy.” American journal of preventive medicine 31.5 (2006): 391-398
- Nagata, Chisato, et al. “Fat intake is associated with serum estrogen and androgen concentrations in postmenopausal Japanese women.” The Journal of Nutrition 135.12 (2005): 2862-2865