Macros in grams v's percentage
DietPrada
Posts: 1,171 Member
This was going to be a reply to another post, but it's important enough to have it's own post. So many people seem confused. I don't pretend to know everything but I have been keto for 4 years and I have read all of the popular literature/websites on the subject - as well as a fair bit of trial and error.
You should always calculate your macros in grams. % means nothing. You can eat 5/25/70 of 1500 or 5000 calories (and yeah, calories do matter to a degree if you're trying to lose weight).
You should eat [target] grams of carbs and protein and fat to be satiated. Up to your fat limit. If you are eating your target grams of all 3 your percents will look how you want them to. If you are eating your target for carbs and protein but not fat your percents might be off - but that doesn't mean your "macros" are off.
In MFP if you start with a calorie goal and then divide it up 5/25/70 (or your chosen percentage) you will get a target number of grams of each. Those are important. The percents are not (other than to calculate the initial amounts). If you over-eat and up your carbs/protein/fat equally to maintain that percentage you are not in fact "staying within your macros".
Likewise if you reduce your intake/calories. It's far better to hit your protein/carb limits and reduce the fat intake a little than to reduce your protein as well (just to keep your percents looking pretty).
You should always calculate your macros in grams. % means nothing. You can eat 5/25/70 of 1500 or 5000 calories (and yeah, calories do matter to a degree if you're trying to lose weight).
You should eat [target] grams of carbs and protein and fat to be satiated. Up to your fat limit. If you are eating your target grams of all 3 your percents will look how you want them to. If you are eating your target for carbs and protein but not fat your percents might be off - but that doesn't mean your "macros" are off.
In MFP if you start with a calorie goal and then divide it up 5/25/70 (or your chosen percentage) you will get a target number of grams of each. Those are important. The percents are not (other than to calculate the initial amounts). If you over-eat and up your carbs/protein/fat equally to maintain that percentage you are not in fact "staying within your macros".
Likewise if you reduce your intake/calories. It's far better to hit your protein/carb limits and reduce the fat intake a little than to reduce your protein as well (just to keep your percents looking pretty).
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I'm glad someone finally made a thread of this. It never ceases to baffle me how someone can look at "5c/60p/35f" and say "zomg your protonz iz too high" without taking the actual grams, the person's LBM, daily calories, etc. into account.2
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And be careful if you have activity automatically added on MFP, it increases your target numbers. If you don't want to eat back your exercise calories, you have to know what your base gram numbers are at the start of the day and stick to those.3
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Is it okay to use the percentages if you stay under the MFP calorie goal do you think? Sometimes I don't eat the full calorie goal that MFP has me set at because I'm just not hungry but when I do that I make sure to keep my macro percentages balanced within the reduced calorie amount I'm eating.0
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Is it okay to use the percentages if you stay under the MFP calorie goal do you think? Sometimes I don't eat the full calorie goal that MFP has me set at because I'm just not hungry but when I do that I make sure to keep my macro percentages balanced within the reduced calorie amount I'm eating.
Nope. Keep protein and carbs static, reduce fat to create your deficit.4 -
Is it okay to use the percentages if you stay under the MFP calorie goal do you think? Sometimes I don't eat the full calorie goal that MFP has me set at because I'm just not hungry but when I do that I make sure to keep my macro percentages balanced within the reduced calorie amount I'm eating.
It's ok to stop eating if you're not hungry, but ignore the percentages. They mean nothing if you don't hit your calorie goal perfectly. The grams will change up and down with higher or lower calories eaten any given day.
Here's what to watch in order of priority. IMO
1.) keep carbs low. Do not exceed your carb grams. It's ok if you are lower. This would throw off that percentage pie chart and that's another reason it's completely unimportant.
2.) eat at least your minimum protein required to maintain muscle. It's ok if you eat a little more or a lot more if you're not diabetic or severely insulin resistant.
3.) eat fat to satiety. If you have eaten naturally fatty foods and cooked with healthy fats and you're below your total grams goal, but you're not hungry, that's fine. You DO NOT need to eat more fat or find ways to put more in your meals. If you ARE hungry, AND you have eaten enough protein and stayed under your carbs... then you're most certainly not eating the right foods. Meaning they are not high fat foods. Maybe you're eating salad without enough dressing or veggies without butter or lean chicken without any other fat for example. If you eat that way and you are NOT hungry between meals, that's perfectly fine. It just means you're getting the energy from your bodyfat instead.
So what happens so often with the focus being on the percentages, is when you're not very hungry, which is common, you don't eat all the fat you're allotted and your pie chart which represents the calorie division, not the grams, will look all wrong even though it's perfectly on track.6 -
Also when eating at a deficit your body is metabolizing your fat stores, so I like to think about any allocated fat % being filled out from within.6
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I used the percentages to calculate my carb ceiling and protein needs. Then I stick with them (mostly) as you said. Protein needs are going to go up or down with weight loss. Only activity level really affects them. And carb needs? Technically there are no carb needs and keeping that in mind makes it a bit easier not to exceed that upper limit.
Once I stopped losing my fats increased since I was not using body fat as much for fuel. It looks like my fat percentage went up but it was just dietary fat rather than body fat.1 -
MimiOfTheLusciousLawn wrote: »And be careful if you have activity automatically added on MFP, it increases your target numbers. If you don't want to eat back your exercise calories, you have to know what your base gram numbers are at the start of the day and stick to those.
@MimiOfTheLusciousLawn - Easiest way to do this - look at the next day where you haven't logged anything yet. Your flat/base numbers should be right there for comparison!1 -
@baconslave - this thread is already a fabulous resource for old and new folk alike. Please add it to the sticky, when you've time, Mistress Librarian.0
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MimiOfTheLusciousLawn wrote: »And be careful if you have activity automatically added on MFP, it increases your target numbers. If you don't want to eat back your exercise calories, you have to know what your base gram numbers are at the start of the day and stick to those.
Good point. I enter all my exercise as 1 calorie burned regardless of what or how long. This may not work for everyone but I'm realistic enough to understand/accept my exercise is pretty moderate and walking at a "brisk pace" for an hour or so (as an example since I do other things too) is more like "a couple hundred" calories versus "a few hundred" based on my weight and other stats. Plus, I've been doing this a long time so seem to have "guestimates" down pretty good. @KnitOrMiss' solution is a quick and effective one too.0 -
KnitOrMiss wrote: »@baconslave - this thread is already a fabulous resource for old and new folk alike. Please add it to the sticky, when you've time, Mistress Librarian.
Roger, Roger.
ETA: Done, done.
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Hi guys - I hope this question is suitably related to the thread topic title:
I have a question.
Ok, I got this off an extremely informative website on calories, their origin, how they're calculated and measured..."...In this [Atwater]system, calories are not determined directly by burning the foods. Instead, the total caloric value is calculated by adding up the calories provided by the energy-containing nutrients: protein, carbohydrate, fat and alcohol. Because carbohydrates contain some fibre that is not digested and utilised by the body, the fibre component is usually subtracted from the total carbohydrate before calculating the calories.
The Atwater System uses the average values of:
4 Kcal per g, for protein,
4 Kcal per g for carbohydrate, and
9 Kcal per g for fat.
(Alcohol is calculated at 7 Kcal/g.)
(These numbers were originally determined by burning and then averaging.)
Thus the label on an energy bar that contains:
10 g of protein (10g x 4 kcal = 40 kcal),
20 g of carbohydrate (20g x 4 kcal = 80 kcal) and
9 g of fat (9g x 9 kcal = 81 kcal)
would read 201 kcals or Calories."
So here's my question:
Bearing in mind that calories are measured by the average content in foods, of those 4 main components (Protein, Carbohydrates, fat and alcohol), How does my breakfast reading come to such a high calorific value, when the numbers ACROSS the chart bear absolutely no relation (and do not add up) to the calorific totals in the left-hand column...?!
Could anyone give me an insight...?
(I understand there is probably a completely rational explanation, but I am not in the slightest bit scientifically- or numerically-minded, so it's a conundrum to me...)
Many thanks!
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@AlexandraCarlyle there's a couple things at play - first is MFP rounds numbers up or down, so on smaller entries (like the Tomatos) it never adds up quite right.
The other, probably more significant factor, is some of the entries are just plain wrong. In data processing, we refer to this as 'garbage in, garbage out'. Eg. the entry for hardboiled eggs doesn't 'add up'. Wherever that data came from, it's probably wrong, and that's contributing to the totals line not adding up.0 -
According to my math it's off by roughly 10%, which I find to be pretty common with rounding. (That is, the real fat number could be 24.6 grams, but it says 25, and so when you do the calculation with the macro numbers it is off.) You actually see this more with more carbs, I think, as fiber is calculated into calories in a confusing way -- not as 4 calories/gram. I tried to figure that out from USDA entries and decided I didn't care enough to worry about it.
Also common, as Steph says, is bad entries or specifically entries that have something off about their macro components.0 -
I can see what I think is one obvious problem with the egg entry. The macros stated for the egg are typical for 1 egg and the entry is for 2 eggs. Since the entry is for 2 eggs: double the fat and the protein from what it shows as 5 and 6 to: 10 fat grams × 9 calories per gram and 12 protein grams X 4 calories per gram and you'll have 90+ 48 which is 138. Close to the 136 displayed for calories. For what ever reason, when 2 eggs were entered in a single entry, MFP doubled only the calories. Or it could be a user provider entry and the user doubled only the calories when he/she manually entered it and clicked on "yes make available" to MFP community (or however that reads).
So as mentioned above by others: garbage in, garbage out. The only thing one can do is find the proper entry that also matriculates (correct term???) properly if doubled, cut in quarters etc, in the system.
It is a PITA but one of the reasons I eventually began saving my commonly used food items as individual entries under "my meals". I have about 80 "meal" items saved. None of them are a meal but rather a single food item from almonds to zucchini. When I enter food into my diary I will use my "my meal" entry that I believe to be correct versus going back into the database and scouring 20 entries on the same item, 10 of which are probably wrong or have a glitch.4 -
Good catch on the egg -- I just looked and saw about 140 cal for two eggs, about right (eggs being 70 cal on average in my mind), but the macros didn't double.
I like the USDA entries for things like eggs.1 -
Now that I'm on a computer with a big screen I can see the rest of it with ease. It does add up with the exception of the egg error, which would also carry down to the total being off. Plus a bit of rounding.
64 gr of fat x 9 = 576 calories
45 gr of combines protein and carbs x 4 = 180 calories
5 gr of fat not picked up in the egg x 9 = 45 calories
6 gr of protein not picked up in the egg x 4 = 24 calories.
576+180+45+24 = 827 calories.
It comes to a high calorie intake because it is what it is, so long as you verified via label the calories. 90 gr of cheese is about 3 ounces and 3 ounces of cheese is about 300 calories. I think in ounces versus grams. I'm not familiar with pickled herring numbers though I do like it! Your scenario indicates to me I best not pair a couple "slices" of pickled herring with 3 oz of cheese if I have a goal of low breakfast calories.
I'd check the label on the pickled herring. That seems like a lot of calories and fat to me but as I said, I don't eat it often. I know it is fatty and oily, both fish and whatever it is often pickled in. I have no idea what a SLICE is. SLICE is not a reliable unit of measure in my mind.
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Now that I'm on a computer with a big screen I can see the rest of it with ease. It does add up with the exception of the egg error, which would also carry down to the total being off. Plus a bit of rounding.
64 gr of fat x 9 = 576 calories
45 gr of combines protein and carbs x 4 = 180 calories
5 gr of fat not picked up in the egg x 9 = 45 calories
6 gr of protein not picked up in the egg x 4 = 24 calories.
576+180+45+24 = 827 calories.
It comes to a high calorie intake because it is what it is, so long as you verified via label the calories. 90 gr of cheese is about 3 ounces and 3 ounces of cheese is about 300 calories. I think in ounces versus grams. I'm not familiar with pickled herring numbers though I do like it! Your scenario indicates to me I best not pair a couple "slices" of pickled herring with 3 oz of cheese if I have a goal of low breakfast calories.
I'd check the label on the pickled herring. That seems like a lot of calories and fat to me but as I said, I don't eat it often. I know it is fatty and oily, both fish and whatever it is often pickled in. I have no idea what a SLICE is. SLICE is not a reliable unit of measure in my mind.
Oh, now... see? This is how stupid I am, when it comes to maths. No, really, I am.
How long is it going to take it to penetrate my dense, pi$$-poor brain that the column on the left is Ca-lar-ries... Calo-ries..... Kal-or-ease... The figures on the right are GRAMMES... gr-ammes...gra-mmes....(If I tell myself idiot-slowly enough, I might get it one day.....!)
I'm going to re-do the page sensibly, and see how it works out.
I'm not worried about the calorific count. As long as my carbs are sensible, my usual 'Ooops, you're over the limit!' is usually fat or protein....
I'm going to follow the suggestions here, and modify my food category and item find.
Thanks all, for being so patient (if it's anything in my favour, I had pretty bad dyscalculia as a kid. It was a dreadful thing to cope with, and not really recognised, accepted, understood or diagnosed until my senior school years....I control it better now, but as a kid, it was a real nightmare!)0 -
@AlexandraCarlyle, Your dyscalculia could be coming into play but I can assure you there are others who are unfamiliar with calorie counting, how mfp operates, the caveats mfp has, etc etc. MFP is many things and 1 thing it is, is a calorie counting site-yes where we can also monitor our grams-and if people are to use it, it helps to understand it.
Your question and the Q&A all of us just participated in, helped someone else, I'm sure.1 -
Thanks for your comment.
I still feel a bit of a doofus.
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Just re-did my count and checked the herrings too. That was a bit over... it's more accurate now....
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Thanks everyone for your help!
(Thinks to self: "Calories - left, Grammes - right... Calories - left, Grammes - right... Calories - left, Grammes - right... Calories - left, Grammes - right..." )2 -
Alex, you might find this thread of interest, it is a long thread with a lot of good tips in it on logging correctly.
http://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/discussion/1234699/logging-accurately-step-by-step-guide/p1
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retirehappy wrote: »Alex, you might find this thread of interest, it is a long thread with a lot of good tips in it on logging correctly.
http://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/discussion/1234699/logging-accurately-step-by-step-guide/p1
That's amazingly helpful, @retirehappy .... I almost feel like deleting my full log, forgetting everything I've done so far, and starting from scratch!
(I wonder if there's a way to do that...?!)0 -
Alex, just keep moving forward, no looking back. Progress not perfection.1
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