Vitamins limit?

daniellekayvance

This may be a silly question, but I had a cup of strawberries with my breakfast and saw that the alert was that I met my vitamin C goal for the day. So should I avoid vitamin c rich foods the rest of the day? When you hit a max of a macro nutrient, do you avoid going over those areas?

Lietchi

Water soluble vitamins (like vitamin C) are safe to consume, you never need to worry about exceeding your goal (you just pee out any excess).
It's more tricky with fat soluble vitamins (for example vitamin A) because any excess is stored in body-fat, but even then, I think the risk is very low if the vitamins come from the foods you consume in your food (as opposed to supplements).

AnnPT77

There's no need to worry if you go over the max of a macronutrient (protein, fats, carbs).

As Lietchi says, most micronutrients from food are fine to eat over goal, too. There are only a few where the human daily requirement is not very far below a risky amount, plus the amount/type of that micro found in common foods is risky. (Selenium is one I can think of offhand that can create issues, but even that would be unusual: Eating 5-6 of those nuts every day could be problematic. There may be other micros and foods that create risk, but it's rare, really not a big worry.) Even the fat soluble vitamins (A, D, E, K) aren't commonly a problem from food sources. (Vitamin A supplements can be.)

Back to the macronutrients, though: Going over goals for any of them is fine. But going over one repeatedly and consistently can imply being consistently under another. Being consistently under goal for protein or fats isn't ideal. (Being consistently under on carbs isn't typically a problem. Proteins and fats include "essential nutrients", essential fatty acids (EFAs) and essential amino acids (EAAs). They're "essential" in the sense that our bodies can manufacture them out of any other food intake, so we need to eat some. Carbs aren't "essential" in that technical sense.)

I'll also point out that all of the above only applies for nutrition/health - which is important, of course. Calories are what directly control fat gain/loss. Nutrition may indirectly affect weight management via fatigue (move less) or appetite (can't stick to calorie goal), but the direct effect is still via calories.

Neither nutrition nor weight loss require being exactly exact on everything every single day. It's not a magic spell where if we have a tiny bit off, bad things happen. Pretty close, on average, over a small number of days - that's fine for all of these elements for either weight loss or nutrition.

Best wishes!