[rewind] a beginner’s guide to understanding and tracking macros

Emily Field 00:00:00  Since we launched the podcast, this episode has consistently been one of our top performers. The interest in macros, how tracking can help you, and tips for getting started continues to grow. In fact, this was the very first episode of the Macros Made Easy podcast, and over time, this platform has become an invaluable space for me to share educational content, and it’s been a fantastic way for clients and potential clients to get a glimpse into my philosophy. I feel incredibly proud to have started the podcast over a year ago, and I’m so excited to keep it going. I decided to rerelease this episode a year and a half later, because it’s the perfect starting point for anyone new to the concept of macros. In this episode, I covered the basics of what macros are, why understanding them matters, and the steps to get started tracking them, how to determine your macro targets, and how to assess if this approach is right for you. But one thing I wish I emphasized more in this episode is the importance of giving yourself permission to be a beginner.

Emily Field 00:00:57  We often expect perfection from the start. A mindset heavily influenced by diet culture, where there’s a clear line between success and failure. When you begin tracking macros, it’s easy to bring that same mentality into the process. So if you’re feeling frustrated as you’re learning, remember that it’s okay to stumble. This is a new skill and it takes a time to get the hang of it. I hope you enjoy this rereleased episode of  A Beginner’s Guide to Understanding and Tracking Macros. Welcome to Macros Made Easy, the podcast that takes the confusion out of tracking macros. I’m your host, Emily Field, a registered dietitian that specializes in a macros approach. In each episode, I help you learn how to eat in a way that supports your health, body composition, and athletic performance goals. We’ll cover the basics of macronutrients how to track for various goals, the role of macros in your health, and how to make sustainable changes to your habits. I’ve helped hundreds of people experience more food freedom and flexibility while navigating their nutrition. So whether you’ve tried macros and it just didn’t stick or you just heard the word macros yesterday, I can’t wait to help you too. 

Emily Field 00:02:01 All right, let’s dive in. What are macros? Macros are short for macronutrients, which refers to the three categories of energy providing nutrients that make up all of our food. And that’s protein, fat, and carbohydrates. By tracking macros, you’re essentially counting the total calorie intake from the mindset that not all calories are created equally. And this is important because protein, fat, and carbohydrates have different effects on the body. You should understand that macros contribute energy or calories, but by counting and manipulating those macros, we are inherently manipulating the overall energy that our body receives, and so we can give our body gentle direction on what we want to see out of it. Many of my clients learn about nutrition through the lens of a diet, and they have no basic, neutral experience with nutrition education. And you may resonate with this. You understand nutrition only through the times that you’ve attempted to lose weight or you’ve dieted in some form, and that might mean that you learned about nutrition with blocks and points attached to it, or maybe colored containers, one size fits all portion control.

Emily Field 00:03:08  You had a meal plan. Maybe you had a list of allowed foods and not allowed foods. Green, yellow, red foods or yes, no maybe foods you know, you can see what I’m saying here. Tracking macros is an alternative to all of that because it a provides you some basic nutrition education as your body understands it, not as a planned program or diet is trying to frame up for you. It’s essentially providing a roadmap to achieve specific goals. So we’re lifting the veil. We have less mystery around changing some of your health markers, your body composition, your athletic performance. It’s going to remove limits on food, which can make for a very healthy relationship with food. So instead of saying you’re not allowed to have this, or you are allowed to have that, these are good foods. These are bad foods. These are fattening, not fattening. Maybe healthy or not healthy. It removes all of that language and food just becomes food, and that can absolutely lead to more food freedom. And then lastly, portion sizes are determined by you.

Emily Field 00:04:10  Not a plan, not a program, not food labels. So that can be an extremely freeing experience. I’m just trying to share with you how flexible dieting, how tracking macros is different from what you’ve previously experienced through your dieting attempts. You’ll oftentimes hear me say that tracking macros puts you in the driver’s seat of how you want to feel, look, and perform. And I really mean that by controlling the protein, fat, and carbohydrate content of your food, you’re giving your body gentle direction for how you want it to function. And I oftentimes put it in another way. I put it like if macros are the language that your body speaks, you’re simply learning how to speak that language back. You’re using that language to give your body clear instructions. And that absolutely cannot happen with counting calories or meal plans or allowed foods, not allowed foods. All that nonsense you may be asking yourself, what about calories? Do calories fit in here anywhere? And I’ll simply say this that calories refers to the overall energy that food contributes.

Emily Field 00:05:09  And just by manipulating calories in your diet, you can see three things and three things only you can see weight gain, weight loss, or weight maintenance. All right. Those are the only three things you can control if you are only looking at calories. Now go one step further. And if you’re tracking macros, you’re inherently already tracking calories by doing so. And by manipulating the macro content of your food and your macro intake, you have much more control over several other things. So lean muscle gain or fat gain, lean muscle loss or fat loss, your satiety, your hunger, your blood sugar balance, your hormone balance, your overall energy all of these things can be manipulated just by tracking macros, which also inherently influence your weight as well. Okay. Let’s next talk about how to start tracking macros with zero experience. You’re going from zero to hero. Where do you even start? Okay, I’m going to break this down into six easy steps. And I want you to know that I’ve talked about this in several different places on my blog and over on Instagram.

Emily Field 00:06:16  If I mention an app or a resource, I will link it in the show notes so you don’t have to pause this app and go searching for that in a different place. All right, so let’s just talk about it. How to get started with tracking macros. Step number one would be to download an app that you’re already familiar with, you already like or you understand and just start logging your current eats without changing anything about how you eat. Okay, I want you to give yourself some grace and lean into some curiosity here and try not to change anything, even when you see it stacking up across your day, or even though you might have opinions about how you’ve been currently eating. Try to just eat how you normally eat, and that will provide a really awesome foundation and data from which we can manipulate later. Okay, step number two would be to take a look at your eats across the week. And look at the macronutrient breakdown of your meals and at the end of the day, and try your best to ignore the calories.

Emily Field 00:07:07  If you have had a long, rich history of dieting, I know that’s going to be tough to do, but try to microdose doing it differently, okay? It won’t always feel this way. It won’t always feel triggering. You won’t always be distracted by those calories, but try to feel that way right now. Microdose it. I say that to my clients all the time. This is going to help us get an understanding of your current eating pattern, and then which macros you potentially could be over or under eating. All right, so because you haven’t changed anything about your current eats, you’re going to start to gather some baseline data. Do you under eat on certain days because you’re busy. Do you overeat the next day because you’re so hungry? Is your breakfast the lightest meal of your day? Do you tend to stack your calories more in the evening? You know, if you are super busy and after work activities, does that change your eating pattern? All of this is good stuff. All right.

Emily Field 00:07:58  Step number three. In this process is going to be to get a macro prescription and compare it to the averages that you’re seeing in your diary. This is when you start to bridge the gap between where you are right now and where you need to be. Okay. You’re going to get a macro prescription from any different area. I have resources for you for that, but I’m going to skip over that for right now. After you know your macro prescription, you’re going to pick one macro to focus on first. And I think this is important because trying to change everything and overhaul everything about your eating is super overwhelming. And it’s one of the main reasons why people give up quickly on macro tracking. So what I want you to do is take an honest assessment of how you’ve been eating. And because you’ve already compared your current eats to your macro prescription, you’re going to start to see that there’s probably one macro that is really far off from where you need to be. And for a lot of people, that’s protein.

Emily Field 00:08:51  So I think that since protein has the most impact on your body composition goals and your athletic performance and likely a lot of your health markers. That’s a great place to start. So what you’re going to do is you’re going to start making changes to your current meals, your current eats, to try to get closer to your macro target for that protein, you’re going to ignore calories. Still, you’re going to ignore carbs and fats as best you can and just work on getting a little bit closer day after day, week after week at hitting that protein goal. Step number five. Once you have that down, once you got that protein goal fairly close, or you’re at least a lot more confident than when you started about how to get closer to that protein target, you’re going to aim to get all three macros within about 5 or 10g of your macro prescription. We usually like to say that up or down five grams of any one of those targets is excellent adherence. It is nailing your macros, and this may not happen on a regular basis for several weeks.

Emily Field 00:09:54  And I want to reiterate that just because you’re not hitting your macros on a regular basis, day after day, week after week does not mean you’re not making progress, and that you won’t see results. Even in the pursuit of trying to hit your macros. You’re doing your body really good. And more than that, you’re doing your mind really good because you’re teaching yourself a little bit more about your habits and behaviors, and that is worth something. Okay. You are every time you track is a little bit of nutrition education. It’s a little notch in your belt in understanding yourself a little bit better. And you know, with more of that data, you’re going to start to understand your body better. You’re going to understand which foods influence you in certain ways. And that’s valuable information. Okay. Last step here is to assess how you feel and make changes if necessary. So I’ve already kind of peeked at this a little bit. But if you set your macros with the intention of weight loss, which is very, very common for people, it’s typical that you set your calories and your macros far too low to be consistent.

Emily Field 00:10:59  I will repeat that when you go out and search a macro prescription and you’re downloading targets from a free app, or you’re even using my calculator to figure out your macros, it’s very typical for you to set your macros far too low because you really want desperately to lose weight. Once you start tracking, though, you realize that those calories are probably not sustainable and they’re not leading to the results that you want. Because you feel tired, you have no energy. You’re craving food. It’s tough to stay at those calorie and macro targets because you have all of this data on yourself, and you’re getting better at better at hitting those targets. You can now make the honest assessment that, oops, I might have set those too low. This is not going to be sustainable for me. I need to revise my macros or, you know, give another example. Maybe you set your macros or a calculator, set your macros for you. And one particular macro was far out of reach, way too hard to hit.

Emily Field 00:11:56  And it’s very common to see this with protein. Some calculators will put that protein up so high it’s miserable to eat that much. And so if you find yourself dreading eating, you’re never going to be consistent long enough for you to see results. Okay, so following my DIY macros guide investing in custom macros. These are two ways that you might have a better fit macro prescription for you that take into account your food preferences and what’s actually possible for you. We’re never going to set your macros so outlandishly high or low that you couldn’t be consistent because again, consistency is really all that matters here. If you don’t like the way that you eat, you will not be consistent. All right. Let’s take it from the top just to review how to get started with tracking macros. If you’ve had zero experience, you’re going to download an app. You’re going to start tracking your current eats without changing anything about how you eat. This is just to make an informed baseline. Your next going to take a look at the macronutrient breakdown of your meals and at the end of the day, and start gathering trends.

Emily Field 00:13:00  Then you’re going to get a macro prescription and compare it to the averages that you’ve been seeing in your diary. This is like the bridge. This is like identifying where you need to be and where you are right now, with grace and curiosity and kindness to yourself. Okay, after you get that macro prescription, you’re going to pick one macro to focus on first and not try to bite off more than you can chew by focusing on all three macros at one time. Once you’ve gotten that one macro down, you’ve altered your meals. You’ve kind of shopped a little bit differently, maybe your meal planning in a different way, and it’s getting you closer to that one macro. You’re probably ready to aim for getting all three macros within 5 or 10g, up or down of your macro totals or macro targets. At that last step is just assessing how you feel, and maybe it would be across all of these steps that you’re doing that, but you’re going to take an honest assessment of like, do I enjoy how I’m eating? Is this something that I think I can be sustainable with, or do I need to make some changes? Do I need to alter my prescription? Maybe I need to lean into my food preferences more? Or maybe I need an expert to help me set my macros.

Emily Field 00:14:06  Something like that. The last note I will leave you with here is that I’m going to highly recommend that you follow these steps in order. If you are completely new to macro tracking, rather than trying to jump to the end and thinking that change everything about your habits and eat completely different than you have been prior, and nail all three macros right out the gate. This is what usually leads people to give up easily and get frustrated with macro tracking. Never really string together multiple days because they’re not going slow and they’re trying to bite off more than they can chew. You got to walk before you can run. Let’s talk next about how to get a macro prescription. So I’ve been using that term throughout this podcast. But what I mean by a macro prescription is the total protein fat and carbohydrate gram totals or targets that you’re going to try to hit by the end of the day. So you are going to manipulate your meals, you’re going to shape your meals with some protein, fat and carbohydrate, and you’re going to eat what you want in order to hit those targets by the end of the day.

Emily Field 00:15:05  A macro prescription can come in many different ways. There are hundreds of free online calculators out there that will spit out protein, fat, and carbohydrate gram totals for you. I usually like to tell people that the more information that they put into a calculator, probably the better fit those macros are going to be for them. But that’s not necessarily true. Sometimes you just need to get started and that’s totally fine. I don’t want to nitpick or split hairs around like a better prescription. So usually a macro prescription or macro targets are formulated based on your sex, age, height, weight, activity level, and your goals. And that’s what we do in my free DIY Macros guide, this is a worksheet that you can use to find your initial targets. And obviously I’m biased, but the worksheet will walk you through these questions and step by step order and have you start thinking about, you know, maybe my carbs need to be higher or lower for these reasons or my fats need to be higher or lower for these reasons.

Emily Field 00:16:02  I’m trying to put you really start you out in the driver’s seat of how you want to eat, because if you like how you eat, you will be consistent with it. If it feels kind of natural to you, you will be consistent with it and you will see results. I will say that if you don’t want to do the math and you want to take all of the guesswork out out of how much you should be eating, you’re probably a great candidate for the custom macro calculation service. This is where my team of registered dietitians and I will dive into your bigger health, picture your food preferences and specific goals, and give you very customized recommendations. So this is probably a service that’s best fit for someone who’s in a life stage. That’s maybe a little bit more complicated, or you have competing goals. You can’t readily set your macros on your own, or you really do want a different or higher level of detail going into this prescription, for whatever reason. A really common question that I get when we’re doing this work is the question is macro tracking for me? And then they rattle off a bunch of different things that are unique to them.

Emily Field 00:17:06  Age, body composition, body fat percentage, activity level. And I want to start by saying I’m really sorry and I apologize on behalf of everyone that you think that macros might not work for you. And this is because I think tracking macros has been presented only as an option or traditionally as an option for fit people, for active people, for people that are already lean and like, want to get leaner because macro tracking and flexible dieting, I use these terms kind of interchangeably. This was born in the bodybuilding space, and you can imagine if you need to step up on stage and be at a very lean composition, and you need to manipulate everything about your diet to present in that way on a specific date. You can see how that precipitates from that culture. And like when it comes to the mainstream, it still has like essence of that. So where you might have learned about macros and where you have heard the term macro tracking first might have been from a very active community or very fit community.

Emily Field 00:18:13  A community that looks a lot at their own aesthetics is highly obsessed with their aesthetics. That’s not true. That’s not the only people that can access this approach. Understand that your body is tracking macros whether or not you are. So by learning how to track and learn how much food is appropriate for you, you’re essentially getting the manual on your body. You’re learning the manual on your body. Your body’s already doing this, so why not we why don’t we speed up your learning curve and have you understand that as well? I want to reiterate, too, that macros are set to you. Meaning your sex, your weight, your age, your activity determines where your macros are set. So even if you’re inactive on the spectrum of totally sedentary to very highly active, you know, on the spectrum of healthy, normal weight underweight to significantly obese macros can work for you. We are catering that prescription to you and all that information that you give us. So that’s what I mean by totally customizable, totally unique to you.

Emily Field 00:19:15  It is a kind of a print for you. All right. We’re getting to the end of this podcast episode, and I want to leave you with a few parting words. I want to explain that tracking macros is the end habit, of which a lot of habits have to come together in order to get you there. In other words, in order for you to hit your macro targets and each of your needs, by the end of the day, you probably have to do a little bit of meal planning. You probably have to do a little bit of looking at menus, a little bit of prepping, kind of gathering, like assessing your kitchen, grocery shopping in a new way. All of those skills make for macro tracking to be kind of frustrating in the beginning, and I totally understand that there can be a big learning curve in the beginning when you’re starting to learn how to track macros. When we’re coaching, obviously if somebody is not hitting their macros, we want to look upstream at any one of those habits, and I can help that person identify holes in their routine.

Emily Field 00:20:13  Or maybe they just need some more resources on recipes. Or maybe they need education on which foods have protein, fat, and carb. If you’re navigating this on your own, you’re going to have to do that all on your own. And I’m not trying to tell you that that’s impossible. I just want to remind you to give yourself some grace and time to develop those skills. You could have every intention, and you could know how to get to your macro totals by the end of the day. That doesn’t mean the foods in your house. It doesn’t mean that you’ve prepped. It doesn’t mean you plan for it doesn’t mean like you like that food, I don’t know. There are several steps before hitting your macro targets that would influence whether or not you do. And it’s not necessarily a bad thing that you stumble through that and you play in the sandbox a little bit, okay? Because by each day or each week or each month that you attempt to do this, you’re finding more and more holes in your routine, and changing those habits is a good thing.

Emily Field 00:21:06  We could have a whole lesson on meal planning. We can have a whole lesson on grocery shopping, or a whole lesson on choosing healthy takeout food or restaurant food. But if you’re just working towards that end goal, a lot of those habits will end up fixing themselves and like shaking themselves out. And you know, you’re going to learn unique to you and your circumstances, what probably needs to be tweaked in order for you to be successful here. So the goal of tracking macros is not to become a lifetime macro tracker, but rather to recalibrate your understanding of how much food is appropriate for you. I say this all the time. You have a terrible understanding of how much food is appropriate for you, especially if you come from a background of dieting. If you come from a background of trying all the plans and programs, nothing sticks your yoyo diet or your yoyo weight cycler. You have no idea how much food is appropriate for you because it’s always been Slanted by or influenced by your last dieting stint. It’s been slanted by your parents when you were growing up, your friends, your coworkers, media, all of that.

Emily Field 00:22:11  Okay, so this is an opportunity for you to really start to pay attention about how you feel while eating, you know, enough food or what we think to be appropriate for you based on our formulas. So usually those people who spend significant time tracking, even for a short period of time in their year, they can confidently dip in and out of that skill for short periods later on. And I say this for myself as well. Like, there may have been times over the last 5 to 7 years that I have tracked more diligently, but probably now the percentage of my year that I’m actually tracking macros very diligently and accurately is like 3,040% of my year. And that is for achieving a specific goal. That might be a health goal. It might be a body comp goal. That might be a performance school of some kind. But I will tell you that my habits outside of diligent tracking are not that unlike the ones that when I, when I am tracking my mean by that is that I have learned what it looks like to have enough food on my plate.

Emily Field 00:23:10  I know what it looks like to search for protein and to add protein in areas where I might not have it, or I know how I feel if I have two meals a day versus four meals a day, I can quickly change course. Because I’ve had my experience with macro tracking, I can quickly change course. If I don’t feel awesome. You’re probably going to hear me say this a lot in the podcast in the future episodes, but I like to refer to macro tracking as a budgeting system. It is a goal neutral budgeting system, so let’s erase any way that you previously learned about macros. You heard about macros or you thought it was framed, and try to come in with a clean slate and understand that because it’s a budgeting system, because it’s a tool, it’s not good or bad. It’s not obsessive or not obsessive. It doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t care what you do with macros. It’s just teaching you the tool. So just like a budgeting tool for your finances doesn’t care what you do with your money, it’s just there to show you what you’re doing with your money and how where it lands.

Emily Field 00:24:11  Same thing goes with macro tracking. You are learning a skill. It is behaving as a budgeting tool for your body, and you can use it for whatever goal you have. And in the same vein of that budgeting example, I’ll oftentimes say watching what you eat without keeping an eye on your macros makes about as much sense as saying, I’m just gonna watch my budget without keeping an eye on your bank account. Like, how often do we hear people say, well, I just need to clean up my eating. I need to watch what I eat, I need to get my shit together. I don’t know, they say something so vague like that. Like, what does it actually mean? And if you’re actually serious about changing some significant part of your health, your body comp, or your athletic performance in a very efficient way, I see tracking macronutrients and looking at the macro content of your food to be one of the best ways to get you there. All right, guys, that concludes our episode.

Emily Field 00:25:02  This is really a beginner’s guide to understanding and tracking macros. We talked about what macros are, why you might want to track them, how to get started tracking macros if you have zero experience. We also talked about how you might get a macro prescription and identify whether or not tracking is for you. Any of the resources, any of the tools I talked about in this podcast will be listed in the show notes. So take a look there if you want to dive in a little deeper. Thank you so much for listening to the Macros Made Easy podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, take a screenshot of the one you’re listening to right now to share it on your Instagram Stories, and tag me @emilyfield so that more people can find this podcast and learn how to use a macros approach in a stress free way. If you love the podcast, head over to iTunes and leave me a rating and a review. Remember, you can always find more free health and nutrition content on Instagram and on my website at emilyfieldRD.com.

Emily Field 00:25:57  Thanks for listening and I’ll catch you on the next episode.