Lesson 11

Calculating Your Macros

Welcome to Lesson 11! Yeah!

Alright, today we are going to calculate our TDEE, set a weight loss (or gain) goal, and pick a macro split! All the reading from yesterday will pay off today! If you want a refresher, here is yesterday’s lesson: Basic Food Science

tl;dr - TDEE stands for Total Daily Energy Expenditure, it is how many calories you burn in a day. It is based on several personal factors. Picking a caloric goal below our TDEE will make us lose weight (lose fat), while a goal above our TDEE will make us gain weight (gain muscle). Lastly, depending on activities and personal preference, one macro split may be better than another.

TDEE stands for Total Daily Energy Expenditure. It is important to know that this is just an estimation of how many calories you burn in a day, based on your height, weight, age, gender, and activity level. A slow or fast metabolism can render your TDEE estimation wrong. So calculating your TDEE is just the starting point - we learn what you really burn in a day by looking at your personal numbers over several weeks. But we’ll get there when we get there. For now, the estimation will get us close enough.

Once we find out our TDEE we can decide how much of a surplus or deficit we want to eat to either gain or lose weight. When losing weight we want to shoot for 0.5-2lbs of fat a week. (Again… When you hear that people lose 15lbs in a week, that’s probably 13lbs of water weight… ) Slow, steady, and maintainable is the name of the game. This way we keep our super important muscle and don’t hate ourselves in the process. If you want to lose weight, here is where I would personally start - shoot for 1lb a week. This means we are going to eat 500 calories less than our TDEE a day for a week. 7*500 = 3500 = 1lb of fat.

The last thing we need to decide is if we want to eat carbs or not. If you’re like me and like to weightlift and do high-intensity workouts, you’ll want carbs (plus I just plain like them). If you want to take a keto approach, go ahead, this would be better for low-intensity workouts such as long-distance running! Or, you can hire a nutrition coach or an RD to work with you and chooses your macros for you weekly - this is personally what I do. I’m a BIG proponent of having coaches. We have them in sports, why not our life?

Alright, let’s put all of this information into action and set ourselves an initial goal! We will be learning how to actually achieve the goal in the next few days! So to calculate your TDEE and set your macros, follow the gif below and finish with tapping “Complete TODOs” at the bottom!

  1. Tap on the puzzle piece on the very bottom right, this will bring you to the meal prep tab

  2. Tap on the calculator at the top right corner.

  3. In the middle of the screen, tap on one of the splits ‘Carb Split’ or ‘Keto Split’. If it’s all the same to you, I’d choose ‘Carb Split’

    • If you have a nutrition coach, RD, or want to set your own macros, use the ‘Custom’ tile

  4. Tap on ‘Starting Weight’ and enter in your info

  5. Tap on ‘Weekly Weight Loss’ and enter in your goal

    • Personally, I’d type in -1.0

    • Also, you may find that you can’t choose to lose more than a certain weight per week - that’s because here at Fitness Frenzy we don’t want you planning to go below 1200 calories a day…

  6. Tap on ‘Activity Level’ and choose the appropriate option, I would error on the side of less active than more.

  7. Tap on the ‘>’ icon in the top left to save!

  8. Hooray! 🎉 You’ve set your macros!

From now on, we will be using the macros you calculate to hit the weekly goal you’ve chosen!

TODOs

  • ☑️ Log your weight

  • ☑️ Log your food

  • ☑️ Log your habit

  • ☑️ Calculate and set your macros

Complete TODOs Below

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