How often do you hit your macros and...

Set your macros thoughtfully. IMO, it's fine to go over on protein and/or fat, bad to lowball them by much. I also advocate a bare minimum of 5 varied fruit/veg servings daily (10 is better) for fiber and micronutrients, but that's just me. I let carbs fall where they may, to meet calorie goal.

It's fine to use protein powder, if needed. (I don't - I prefer food tastiness-wise.) For many folks, it's easier to hit the overall protein goal if they get a solid amount in each meal/snack.

Improving one's eating is an evolutionary process. Diary review and gradual adjustment helps.

Yes, this is hard for me, too.

Are you eating much meat?

I'm a longtime vegetarian, which seems like the obvious difficultly, but many diets recommend eating largely veggie, and it's common advice for a healthy lifestyle, so it seems more difficult than I thought it'd be. My current focus is to practice eating whole, balanced foods and keeping my protein goal. And I think a nutritionist would high five my menus. But I always have to plan my meals, enter them, and then go back and make swaps to get to that goal. Like, this week, I had what I thought was a super veggie-heavy, low dairy, high protein setup, but I was 15 g over in carbs and 11 over in protein. Dang it!

This week, it wasn't really possible to get rid of any of the carbs - no white bread, rice, etc., only sprouted whole grains, beans, veggies, etc. Even though I was at calorie target and proud of my healthy plan, I had to decrease my dinner serving size and add an extra egg to breakfast to wiggle up into "compliance".

Gotta figure out a better way. Trying to build habits and this isn't really habit friendly.

dolcezza25 wrote: »

How do you do it? I'm always close-ish but usually over a bit in fat and under more than an bit a protein by just a bit no matter how hard I try. I'm generally only eating whole unprocessed foods.

I usually can't hit my protein without a protein supplement. Looking for advice here...

As long as you're close. I pay more attention to protein and calories than anything else. If I hit my protein then I feel like it was a win for the day, especially if that wasn't made up of protein bars and shakes. I usually hit my pre-workout goal everyday (working out adds like 30-40 more grams of protein and I already get 110 grams so I don't eat the additional)

I pre plan food, that way i can play around with amounts until it works out to the numbers I want.

Probably never. I'm just starting so I'm happy to be meeting my calorie goals right now. A couple of times a day I get one of the "warnings". Lol.

Every single day (with a few exceptions).