Hello Everyone
I wanted to add a little bit more from yesterday’s blog. Some of my clients wanted me to go into a little more detail about calories, carbs, protein, and fat. Well first of all think of calories as energy. The body needs energy to survive. You get your energy from food. Food contains energy that we measure as calories. You will see on a lot of food labels all kinds of nutrition information about how many calories, carbs, protein, fats, sugars, and etc,. that are in that serving of food. It also gives you an estimated value of what percentage of each nutritional item you need on a daily food intake of about 2000 calories.
So let’s say you consume about 2000 calories a day eating. How much carbs, protein, and fats do you need to intake? Well it depends on what your goals are, your activity level, gender, age, and a bunch of other factors. But just to keep it simple, let’s say your diet needs to be 40% carbs, 40% protein, and 20% fat. This means that all the calories and food you comsume, your carbs percentage is 40% of your total diet of the the three(carbs, protein, fats).
What you need to do is count how many grams of carbs, protein, and fat that you consumed in food after you have figured out that you have eaten 2000 calories for the day. So let’s keep this simple and say you ate 80 grams of carbs, 80 grams of protein, and 40 grams of fat. This gives you the percent of 40/40/20 that we just discussed. We therefore would have achieved our goal of 2000 calories a day with the ideal percentage of carbs/protein/fats that we wanted in our diets.
However if you had consumed 80grams of carbs, 70grams of protein, and 25 grams of fat, your percentage ratio would be 45/40/15. This gives you a higher carb diet with a little less fat. If that is what you wanted, great. If not, you need to adjust the foods you eat until you get your 2000 calories a day that helps you achieve a percentage ratio of 40/40/20. If you consume 2500 calories a day and still want to keep the 40/40/20 ratio, you will again have to adjust what you eat to achieve your desired food nutrition.
I have seen many different carb/protein/fat ratios all over the internet, books, magazines, and just having discussions with others. Some of the ratio I have seen are the 40/40/20, a 60/30/10, a 55/35/10, a 45/45/10, and etc,. You need to define a goal and pick a ratio that will help you achieve your goals. If you are a person who wants to lose weight and you eat 3000 calories a day, you probably should reduce your calories by 250 to 500 calories a day and pick a carb/protein/fat ratio that is low in fat(not to low), lower in carbs, and is higher in protein. Don’t forget that you cannot avoid fats as there is plenty of healthy fats out there for you. Okay, how about the guy who is trying to gain some lean muscle mass. Well you need a ratio that is higher in carbs and protein with less fats. You also need to eat more calories per day. 250 to 500 calories more a day. If you are not seeing any gains, increase your calories and maintain the carb/protein/fat ratio until you see gains.
Most of this stuff just comes from knowing your own body and how it handles increase calories and what percentage of carbs, proteins, and fats you need in your system. Again age, sex, genetics, body type, activity level, and etc,. are all factors in your weight management and health. Also there is plenty of resources out there that go into a lot more details then I have. This blog was just a very general idea of how detailed your nutrition plan needs to be in order to accomplish your goals.
Hope you enjoyed it.
Master Jonathan Field