How 100% daily requirement

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Letsdothis749
Letsdothis749 Posts: 34 Member
How do you guys go about making a day's plan of what to eat to get to 100% in each category?

I can do the math and know where to find the numbers on packaged foods, it just seems like there would be more specific info out there. I just can't find it.
There are so many combinations but all of them fall short.
Help?

Replies

  • lynn_glenmont
    lynn_glenmont Posts: 9,964 Member
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    I don't obsess over getting every nutrient exactly spot on. I have goals for protein, fiber, and iron (I would have a goal for fat if I didn't nearly always get more than what my goal would be without any special effort), and don't worry if I go over on those, and don't worry about other things.
  • AnnPT77
    AnnPT77 Posts: 32,154 Member
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    Personally, I don't think it's important to hit exactly 100% on every useful nutrient every single day. I think it's fine to average out to good levels over a day or few. For most essential nutrients, it's not like the body has 16 seconds (or whatever short time) to use the nutrient or it's gone forever. Digestive transit can take up to 50+ hours, the body has mechanisms to retain/juggle certain nutrients before excreting them, etc. MFP resets at midnight, but bodies don't.

    Humans are adaptive omnivores, with millennia of natural selection having created biochemical/physiological strategies to keep us reasonably healthy with fluctuating food types/amounts. (I get that in our fortunate modern world, we may want to optimize rather than shoot for just OK, but it's useful to recognize that there's some flexibility over short-ish timespans.)

    In that context, I usually look at my MFP nutrition totals for the week as most important, and don't fixate on each day being exact.

    One first thing you can do - may already be doing - is making sure that you choose food database entries that are as complete as possible. Some entries lack details, either because they weren't on the food package, or because the MFP user who entered the food didn't care about accuracy. It's super common to see people here think they're not getting adequate potassium, for example, but find that the problem isn't what they're eating, but rather missing data.

    Beyond that, what I did to improve nutrition was not to try to perfect a food plan to hit 100% on everything all at once, but rather took a gradual approach, based on eating patterns, and prioritizing what to work on next. I started just trying to get calories and satiation in a good place, then worked on protein and fats, then looked for micronutrients where I was often under a desirable level and worked on those. For me, it was important to meet those goals via foods I actually enjoy eating, and that are affordable/practical for me.

    The food diary is a pretty powerful tool. When I was working on some individual nutritional goal, the process was loosely to look for foods that "cost" relatively many calories, but weren't as useful to me for satiation, other nutrition, or taste/happiness. Those were things I could reduce or eliminate, and replace with foods I like that better met my goals. To find candidate foods, I would do a web search for "foods high in (whichever nutrient)", or look at things I was already eating that had the desired nutrients that I might be able to eat happily more often.

    By chipping away at my eating patterns when I had the time/energy to do this, I gradually improved the overall nutritional profile. This wasn't rigid food plans, but just ideas like "maybe I should have broccoli more often, because I like it and it has lots of the vitamin A/C I need", then I'd get those foods into the rotation more often.

    Personally, I don't care how many carbs I eat, nor do I care if I'm over on fats, protein, or sodium, as long as I'm reasonable on calories. Ditto for sugar, with the context that I eat relatively little added sugar (just by taste preference, not some orthorexic thing) - I'm well within the WHO guidelines for added sugars, but get quite a lot of inherent sugars in fruits, veggies, and no-sugar-added dairy foods.

    I do try to make sure some of the fats are MUFA/PUFA sources, plus have some reasonable O-3/O-6 balance. (I could explain why but this is too long already.)

    Within those idiosyncratic personal preferences, I'm at/over 100% most individual days on the MFP-tracked micros, essentially always over on weekly average, and I've spot-checked others I was concerned about, and been OK on those as well. ("Spot-checked" means looking up the nutritional details for a couple of typical eating days, to see how my routine shaped up.)

    For me, a key thing for getting micros and fiber was making it a point to eat really lots of varied, colorful veggies and fruits. With rare exceptions, I get a minimum of 5 x 80g servings of veg/fruit daily, and strive for 10+ servings (usually get there.) When I do that, the micros generally fall into place. (Part of my personal satiation formula is volume, so this may be an easier/better strategy for me than it would be for some other people.)

    To me, taking a gradual approach, a "review diary and revise eating patterns" approach, is easier and less daunting than trying to make a perfect, structured eating plan. YMMV.

    This is what a recent week looked like, just as a point of honesty:
    qn7avvs1sy55.png

  • imatoughgirl
    imatoughgirl Posts: 16 Member
    edited August 2022
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    I really focus more on calories. Some days I may want to eat healthier and some I may be in a situation where my food isn't so "healthy" but I keep portions down. I find that if try to be too strict on every little thing, I burn out quickly and will quit.
    I like the fact that this tracker allows me to choose "bad" foods sometimes and doesn't cost me an astromical number of food points (like Weight Watchers). The flexibility is what will make a long term weight goal possible IMHO.
  • endermako
    endermako Posts: 787 Member
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    it's like a tetris puzzle for me I never try to focus on 100% for micro nutrients. I focus mainly on Carbs, protein, fat and fiber. I get pretty close on the daily but I really try to just keep track of my weekly amounts. My day can also be fully of random foods. So it's really up to your imagination what you could do with the macros you have
  • yirara
    yirara Posts: 9,394 Member
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    I don't. Breakfast and lunch and everything inbetween is kind of the same every day, but with different things on bread and different fruits. So I make sure dinners fit into my calorie allowance, and then I cook according to that. If I make a rice or noodle dish I weight and log the ingredients and then fill up the recipe with the amount of rice or pasta to fit into the calories. I don't care about macros.