Thread by @Rob_NBF

How to calculate your macros for gaining muscle and include any food in your diet (even ice cream)!

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You can eat ice cream, chocolate, pizza, cookies, cake etc. WHATEVER YOU WANT whilst losing fat OR building muscle.

The key is how much.

This thread will show you how to calculate what you should be eating, and fit these foods into it.

Now, obviously cake and ice cream aren't healthy. I'm not trying to say that if you eat them regularly that's optimal for health.

There's more to food than macronutrients. Micronutrients are important too, so you've got to make sure you're getting them.

If you've got plans to hit your protein requirement by drinking 8 scoops of whey protein, and then fill up the rest of your calories with junk, PLEASE DON'T.

Get your protein and your calories from real, nutritional food 80+% of the time.

Before we start, let's look at some reasons why you'd want to track macros.

#1 - Incorporate treat foods into your diet.

You can eat ice cream & pizza without any guilt or feeling like you failed. Still hit your numbers? No harm done.

Great for when you have social obligations

#2 - Learn skills that will keep you lean for life

Try this for at least 30 days, tracking accurately with digital scales

After that, you'll have learned so much you won't really need to track that accurately any more.

You'll be able to gauge your intake.

Right, let's get into it.

The first thing you've got to work out is how many calories you should be eating.

You can use an calculator for this (like this one I'm linking) or you can use the very simple formula I'm about to share.

freedieting.com/calorie-calcul…

The key thing to note is that whatever number you get is an ESTIMATION. A ballpark figure.

None of this is an exact science, it's a best guess.

The magic is going to be in how you course correct and respond based on what happens.

The first thing we need to know if your BMR (basal metabolic rate).

This is how many calories you'd (roughly) burn if you laid comatose in bed all day.

This will be a significant portion of what you burn in a day (yeah, you get these for free - no activity required).

To get a ballpark figure for BMR multiply your weight in pounds by 4.536 - Write this number down

Now multiply your height in inches (there's 12 inches in a foot) by 15.88

Add to the number you wrote down.

Now take 5x your age & minus it from the sum of the other two numbers

The number you're left with is your BMR.

Now, you don't lie in bed all day, so you've got to multiply this by another number to get your TDEE (total daily energy expenditure).

Multiply by:

1.2 - little or no exercise, desk job
1.375 - light exercise 1-3 days/week
1.55 - moderate exercise 3-5 days/week
1.725 - hard exercise daily, sometimes 2x/day
1.9 - hard exercise 2 or more times per day, or training for marathon, triathlon, etc.

If you think you're between two of the multipliers, pick something in the middle.

Most people won't need to go above 1.6

Again, this isn't exact, we're using a ballpark. You'll adjust based on what happens.

So, whatever number you have now is your TDEE or maintenance.

In other words (roughly) the number of calories you burn every day - on average.

If you want to lose weight, you'll need to eat less than this amount (recommend 20% less, no more than 30%).

If you don't need to lose fat you're going to want to GAIN weight to maximise gaining strength & muscle from your training.

Add 10% to your maintenance, no more than 20%. Adding more won't make you gain more muscle. It will just mean you gain more fat while you gain muscle.

Let's do an example.

30 year old, 5'10 180 lb who has a desk job but goes to the gym 3x/week.

180 x 4.536 = 816
5'10 = 70 inches, 70 x 15.88 = 1,112

816 + 1,112 = 1,928

30 x 5 = 150

1,928 - 150 = 1,778

Multiplied by 1.375 for activity...

Ballpark TDEE = 2,445

If this guy wanted to lose fat, I'd take 20% off of this number, which is 1956.

For gaining, I'd go 10% over it (to start), which is 2,690.

Right, got all that?

Let's stick with this example and work out macros.

The first macro to work out is protein.

The easiest way to do this is to take your bodyweight in pounds, and eat that many grams of protein.

So if you weight 180 lbs, you eat 180g of protein. Super easy.

Also not without some problems.

The first problem with this is that you don't actually NEED that much protein for gaining muscle.

This study analysed 49 other studies and found that more protein led to greater strength and muscle gains, but only up to 1.6g per kilogram of bodyweight.

That's only 0.73g per lb.

So there's no additional strength or hypertrophy benefit of eating more than 0.73g per lb of your bodyweight....

BUT there's no downsides to eating more either.

If you want to lose fat, it's actually going to be easier if you consume more protein.

Protein is very filling & it raises your metabolic rate because your body has to work harder to digest it.

So for fat loss go with 1g per lb.

The only caveat here is that overweight people don't need to work this out based on their current weight.

A 300 lb person doesn't need to eat 300g of protein or even 219g (0.73g per lb).

If you're over about 25% bodyfat, then use your goal weight instead.

Don't know what body fat % you're at?

Don't take your scale's word for it.

See this post for help estimating

nothingbarredfitness.com/how-to-estimat…

Don't know what goal weight you should aim for?

Work out your current BMI, then work out what you'd weigh if your BMI were 25 or lower (but no lower than 18.5).

Use this site to help

nhlbi.nih.gov/health/educati…

So, if your goal is fat loss, work out your goal weight in lbs, then eat that many grams of protein.

Our example guy is looking to gain, and he's happy with protein intake of 1g per lb.

That puts him at 180g protein per day.

Right, onto fat.

Fat is an essential part of every diet.

Therefore there is a minimum amount of fat you should eat.

The minimum I'd recommend setting fat at is 0.35g per lb of your bodyweight.

Using 0.35g will allow you to eat more carbs.

If you like fatty foods, set your fat higher, like 0.6

Our example guy wants a moderate fat, moderate carb diet, so he's going for 0.5g fat per lb.

That gives him 90g of fat (didn't need a calculator for this one!)

Right, now onto carbs...

To get the carb intake, we now need to figure out how many calories you'll be eating from protein and fat.

Protein calories = protein grams x 4
Fat calories = fat grams x 9

So in our example that's 180 x 4 = 720 calories from protein.

90 x 9 = 810 calories from fat.

Add your protein and fat calories together and subtract the total from the total calories you're eating for the day.

Our example:

2,690 - 810 - 720 = 1,160 calories for carbs

Carbs are 4 calories per gram so divide this number by 4 to get carb grams

1,360/4 = 290g of carbs

Final macros:

P: 180
F: 90
C: 290

Now, all that's left to do is ACCURATELY track your intake in My Fitness Pal (use a digital scale to weigh foods until you get practised at it)

Scan barcodes of things that come in packages and don't use someone else's recipe in the database for meals made up of lots of small bits, like chilli con carne. Track the ingredients individually.

Keep an eye on your weight.

Weigh yourself under the same conditions daily. Naked, upon waking, before eating or drinking but after going to the toilet is best.

Keep a record and compare your AVERAGE weekly weight.

The first week will probably see fast weight loss if you're doing that.

After that, you want to see 1-2 lbs per week loss (against the average weight).

If you're losing more than 1% of your total weight per week it's too fast, you need to eat more.

If you're gaining, again ignore the first week.

After that, you want to see 0.5 - 1 lb per week weight gain.

If it's consistently faster than that, bring your calories down a bit (don't go below the fat or protein minimum).

That's it!

Please RT this the first tweet in this thread if you found it useful, and share what macros you got below!