MOS: Macronutrients

I receive one of two responses when pointing out that, even when they work, a lot of popular diets have an element of bullshit in the marketing. One response is “huh, thanks for clearing that up.” The other, more typical response? “Fuck you, it worked for me.”

Counting macros worked for me. But I’m going to tell you something most people don’t say after they’ve had a diet work for them:It’s probably not the diet for you.

Today’s Moment of Science… Macros.

Protein, carbohydrates, and fat are the three types of calories, otherwise known as macronutrients. While protein and carbohydrates each have four calories per gram, fat is the most calorie dense macronutrient at nine calories per gram. All three have nutritional value and uses in the body, and while it’s healthy for the majority of people to get a balance of all three in their diet, figuring out the right amount of each is can be tricky.

But we don’t look at foods and see a list of numbers. We see cheese and guacamole and heaven forbid, bread. How does running a diet based on counting macros translate into real life?

It’s a fucktacularly annoying amount of algebra, really.

First, screw guesswork, this starts with how many calories you’re burning and science has you covered. To find your resting metabolic rate (RMR) you can get in depth testing with medical professionals using fancypants equipment, but that’s for people with time and money. For my millennial audience, we can get a decent fast and dirty estimate with eighth grade math, and it’s relatively accurate for most healthy people. Multiply weight in pounds by ten, and that’s approximately the number of calories burned daily doing absofuckinglutely nothing. For more accuracy, the Harris & Benedict equation takes into account your age, height, and gender when calculating RMR.

After that, per the ethos of the macro counter, the calorie counts and foods are really up to you based on your fitness goals and plans. You can eat anything as long as it fits your macros.

Generally there’s a focus on a high amount of protein (calculated based on weight and fitness goals) and the split of carbs and fat is flexible, generally based on preference. A diet made popular amongst bodybuilders, it leans on meticulously tracking both calories and their breakdown as macronutrients. With careful adjustment of levels of each macronutrient, it’s used to manage muscle gain and fat loss. Builders will go through cycles of bulking and cutting, and calorie restrictions are often on the modest side in an attempt to preserve gains.

‘But Mrs. Auntie SciBabe,’ I hear you thinking, ‘how is this not kinduva pain in the ass to add math into mealtime?’

I’m going to be real with you about what I like and don’t like from doing this diet.

There are two shitty things about diets: hunger and deprivation. With macros, you’re not deprived of anything, but you have trade-offs to make in the hunger department if you decide to blow half your day’s calories on cronuts. Which, to be fair, is a valid decision.

Sometimes thought of as a junk food friendly diet because you “can” eat anything, most recommendations are to fill up on your fruits, vegetables, whole grains, legumes, and lean protein for at least 80% of your calories. If you want cookies for the last 20%, go for it. Knowledge is being aware that you can lose weight eating only junk food. Wisdom is knowing that you’re gonna regret not eating fiber.

This is where we need to have a chat about diet sustainability, because macro tracking is… a lot. It works. But it’s a lot. I’m sure there’s gonna be a weight lifter in the comments saying “I DID IT AND-”Yeah, and your muscles have muscles, Chet. I’m super happy for you. But the amount of effort to really do this diet?

To make sure your calorie and macronutrient counts are accurate, it is commonly recommended that you weigh your food to prevent caloric miscalculations. In a diet that relies on careful tracking and also allows you to eat anything regardless of caloric density, eyeballing it is the mother of all fuckups.

Oof.

People who use this diet enjoy that it takes the guesswork out, but weighing with 100% accuracy every sip of coffee, scoop of casserole, and dinner out to eat is not in the cards for everyone’s life. The necessity to track every morsel of food means that it’s just not the right way to structure eating for everyone, for logistical and mental health reasons.

So can I say I recommend this diet? I can say it did help me lose weight, but more than that, it really helped me unlearn some pseudoscientific ideas about ‘bad’ foods. It’s possibly going to be right for some of you. But as is the case for every diet, I don’t recommend making any drastic changes to how you throw your macros together until you have a long chat with a registered dietitian.

This has been your daily Moment of Science, still in denial of the macros of barbeque I ate last week.

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About SciBabe 375 Articles
Yvette d'Entremont, aka SciBabe, is a chemist and writer living in North Hollywood with her roommate, their pack of dogs, and one SciKitten. She bakes a mean gluten free chocolate chip cookie and likes glitter more than is considered healthy for a woman past the age of seven.

1 Comment

  1. My perspective on diets: they’re all evil. Now, I could be biased from decades of eating disorder, but still. It would be nice if we could just eat. Turning food into a mass-profit machine was probably a bad idea.

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