Struggling to reach total fat, protein, carbs

First of all, you should be eating all your recommended calories and at least half your exercise calories.

Are you doing that?

If you are, try changing your nutritional breakdown from “daily” view to “7 day” view.

I find that I can be pretty far off on one or another macro in a daily basis, but if I change to a weekly view, I am acceptably close.

I have a pretty regular routine. Most days I’m low fat and carb and super high protein. But every Sunday we get doughnuts, and that flips in reverse. Instead of stressing daily, that weekly average gives me the ability to relax and just enjoy food without freaking over macros.

The only macro I monitor relative close on a daily basis (other than Doughnut Sundays) is protein. I eat very high protein and if I see myself leaning in the wrong direction during the week, I’ll tweak my pre-logged meals on the fly. Maybe I couldn’t have that chicken wrap for lunch, so I’ll pull the afternoon popcorn and replace it with jerky or yogurt. That kind of thing.

The key thing for me was counting calories, trying to eat more nutritious food (not hard since I used to live off chocolate) and just being more aware of what went in my mouth overall.

There’s no Macro Police with a magic nightstick that are gonna make you fat again if your macros are mildly out of whack.

I wouldn’t place too much emphasis on hitting macros perfectly. As long as you get in enough protein, the fats and carbs usually work themselves out to where there isn’t a big issue if you’re off a bit. Calories are what really matter.


Now, if you’re having trouble eating the suggested calories you may have your calorie goals set too high.

If you're only eating half your calories, yes, that's bad. Work on getting at least to your protein and fats goals in grams.

If you're eating all your calories, but only getting to half your macro gram goals, what's bad (inaccurate) is the entries you're picking from the MFP database.

Calories for a food should = (4 x protein grams) + (4 x carbohydrate grams) + (9 x fat grams) + (7 x alcohol grams) or close. (They can be a little off because of rounding issues, but they shouldn't be off by half. And yes, alcohol grams are not in the database. If you're not consuming actual alcoholic beverages, that part can be ignored. If you are consuming alcoholic beverages, you can figure it out from the ABV or proof.)

The people saying you don't have to hit macro goals exactly are correct. Pretty close, on average over a few days, is fine. And macros don't directly affect weight loss anyway, if that's your main goal. Weight loss is all about calories. (Sub-ideal nutrition can have an indirect effect through increased appetite/cravings or decreased energy level, but the direct effect of those is still because cravings make it hard to stick to calorie goals, and decreased energy makes us move less and burn fewer calories than we would if properly nourished.)

Focus on getting the right amount of protein and calories