What's My Daily Calorie Need?

Welcome to today's lesson of What's My Daily Calorie Need. This week we're going to discuss exactly how to figure out where your calorie intake should be and how to figure out your personal macronutrients. (Protein, Fats, and Carbs)

There are only three reasons, in my mind, of why you would want or need to track your macros.

1. If you feel like you're eating healthy + doing well on your fitness journey, but you're not getting a result.
2. If you are starting a fitness journey and you want to be super methodical and regimented about your process.
3. If you're on a fitness journey and have a competition or an event coming up, it is so important for you to know exactly what's fueling your body so that you can make adjustments to your activity and performance level. If you're not seeing the energy or the performance that you want, you would want to be tracking your macros so that you could quickly figure that out.

What's My Daily Calorie Need

There are 3 macronutrients:

1. Protein
2. Carbs
3. Fats

Every gram of protein has 4 calories, every gram of carbs has 4 calories and every gram of fat has 9 calories.

To get your daily calories calculation, you're gonna want to go to the TDEE calculator website here: https://tdeecalculator.net/

What it stands for is Total Daily Energy Expenditure. You want to be careful when you're punching in your information here. It's going to ask for your age, your gender, your height, and your body fat percentage if you know it. I would only use information from an InBody scan or a DEXA scan on those just for accuracy.

But where you want to be careful is when it asks your energy expenditure every day. Most people who work out a few times a week, they're like, "Oh, my workouts are intense." So they put intense activity level daily, but they're only spending one-hour daily doing intense activity.

The rest of it they may be sitting at their desk. So go a little lower on your feedback on the energy expenditure part. That's the part that'll mess up your result.

If you're getting great workouts, awesome, but unless you are working for UPS where you're lifting boxes all day long for most of your workday, then you want to go a little bit lower where it asks for your activity level.

You're going to type in all your information and you're going to hit calculate. This number shows you how many calories a day your body burns.

Mine is 2,340 calories a day for Total Daily Energy Expenditure of me going through my normal day to day routine with my exercise figured into this equation. If I want to stay exactly the weight I am, which is 145 lbs, then I want to continue to eat that number every day.

Most of the time when we're tracking our Total Daily Energy Expenditure, we're doing this for fat loss or weight loss so I like to start people at a 20% deficit. I think that is a safe place to start.

It's aggressive enough for you to get results and be excited about what you're doing. Also, you don't want to start deeper than 20% deficit. What happens if you do is after a few days you'll end up super tired or super hungry and it starts an unhealthy eating pattern of bouncing from under to overeating.

A 20% deficit for me would be approximately 500 calories less daily. That takes me to 1,840 calories and I'm going to test this for one week.

Here's how we break it down to the 3 macronutrients. I'm an athlete and I work out, so protein values are important. I'm going to go with 35% of my intake being protein, 35% carbs, and 30% fats.

We're going to divide the 1,840 calories by 100 so it's going to give us 18.4 and then you're going to multiply by your percentages above.

Once we do the calculations my protein is going to be 644 calories, my carbs are going to be 644 calories and then my fats at 30% are going to be 552 calories.

Now we want to take this to grams so that we can use the phone app to track it and help us stay on track.

Remember earlier when I said every gram of protein has 4 calories, every gram of carbs has 4 calories and every gram of fat has 9 calories, well now we're going to use those numbers to figure this out in grams.

To get our fats in grams we're going to divide 552 by 9 and that's going to give us 61 grams then do the same for the carbs and fats which will give us 161 grams for each when dividing 644 by 4.

Now, this is just my suggestion of where to start. Some coaches will start people out being completely even which would be 33%, 33%, 33% but if you are a person who is athletic and doing weight training, I don't mean cardio, I mean weight training, resistance training, then I want to see that protein level up a little bit because you need to have it higher to repair muscle.

Let's talk about healthy weight loss. Friends, it did not take you one week to put on 15 extra pounds or whatever it is that you're trying to lose. So I want you to be patient with yourself. It's much healthier to lose this body fat in a solid, consistent way because it's going to stay off that way.

If you're looking for a great place to start and you're ready to hit the reset button you can join the 7 Day Food & Fitness Fix by clicking the button below.

Also, if you would like my personal assistance so you know you're starting out on the right foot for your personal needs you can schedule a consult call here:

I hope you got value and if you have any questions, pop them below, I'm happy to help! <3