What the hell is a macro and why should you count them?

How you look is a by-product of your training and your training is a by-product of the food and fuel you put into your body. So it would make sense to first and foremost focus on your nutrition, to Eat for Performance, right? Because if you eat primarily to perform well, you will be able to train harder, beat your personal bests and most importantly HAVE FUN. Thereby, as a positive bonus, you will achieve your body composition goals. A common mistake a lot of people do when they are trying to lose fat or make lean gains is, hold your breath; they don't eat enough. Or, they eat "clean" as they like to call it, but too much.

By learning how to implement flexibility, being consistent and eating for performance you will prevent failure and achieve your goals effectively. It won't even be hard, boring or restrictive, because you will be able to implement your favourite foods daily. Yes. Even ice-cream, as long as it is kept within your daily macro limit. If this sound too good to be true, contact me NOW by clicking HERE and I will prove you wrong. I offer your first two weeks for free for a limited time.

The only two rules that are going to help you achieve your goals are CONSISTENCY and SUSTAINABILITY. You need to be consistent with what you are doing and what you are doing needs to be sustainable. Going on a strict diet or depriving yourself of certain foods is not sustainable, therefore you can't be consistent with it either. So eventually you will fail. Are you with me?

Nutrients are what living organisms needs to live and function. We have two categories of those; Macronutrients are made up of protein, carbohydrates and fat. These are the kind of nutrients our body needs in larger quantities, the fuel, what our body uses to produce energy and tissue.

Micronutrients are more commonly known as vitamins and minerals, which our body only requires small amounts of. They support our metabolism and assists our body with the chemical reactions to keep it alive, healthy and developing.

Protein

Your body needs amino acids, which are the building blocks of protein, for many important bodily functions. It is used to maintain your immune and cellular function, replicate your DNA and build and repair tissues in your body. For someone who trains protein plays a very important role, since it is responsible for muscular growth and repair. What you are doing by training is basically breaking down your muscles. To recover and let your muscles rebuild themselves bigger and stronger, you need to consume protein.

Carbohydrates

You have probably heard a million times by now that carbs will make you fat. Wrong! If you are going to participate in something that requires energy, for example being alive, or you want to have fun with your training, experience optimal performance, be able to train hard and beat your personal bests: You. Need. Carbs.

When you eat carbs they are converted into glucose and fructose, which is the most readily energy source for the body to use. Fructose is absorbed freely while glucose needs help from insulin, which is an anabolic hormone with strong effects on tissue growth. Your pancreas starts producing insulin when you consume carbs and this hormone then makes cells absorb blood glucose to use for either energy or storage. What is immediately needed will be used as energy and the rest will be stored inside your muscles and liver as glycogen for the body to use later. Like a reserve tank. When the storages are full, the rest will be converted into fatty acids which gets stored in your fat cells. This means that carbs will only make you fat if you eat more than you need.

Fats

Fats are super important for your body to function at optimal levels. To start with, they are the basic building blocks of several hormones. Without adequate fat intake you can expect inefficient hormone production and forget all about hormone balance. And if your hormones are all over the place, expect the same for your health, happiness and well-being.

You also need fats to maintain healthy and pain-free joints, something which you'll appreciate if you train regularly. They are needed for your body to absorb fat soluble vitamins, in other words A-, D-, E- and K-vitamins. If you want nice, smooth and fresh looking skin and hair, fats will serve you well. The list can be made long.

Calories

The calories you eat are metabolized, "burned", by your body. If you eat more than you burn, you'll gain tissue, and vice versa, if you eat less than you require, you'll lose tissue. By figuring out your baseline needs, in other words what your body needs to maintain its current shape, we can then start manipulating and increase or decrease your intake. This is depending on what your goals are, performance based as well as body composition wise. It is also dependent of what your training and lifestyle looks like and how your body adapts, transforms and changes.

Micronutrients

To ensure an adequate intake of vitamins and minerals for optimal health and performance, the majority of the food you eat should be high in micronutrients. In other words, you need to make smart food choices. Now that doesn't mean you ONLY have to eat "healthy" and nutrient rich foods, it just means that you should eat more of it than ice cream.

What happens when you eat too much healthy food?

The fact that you cut out everything that are considered "unhealthy" from your diet and start living off salads, chicken and broccoli will not necessarily help you lose fat. If you don't keep track of what goes inside your body you may be eating 3000 calories when your body only needs 2500. If two people both have the same daily baseline needs, lets say 2500 calories, and one of them eats 3000 calories worth of ice cream daily and the other one eats 3000 calories worth of broccoli, they will both gain weight regardless.

Your body doesn't know the difference between "clean" and "dirty" when it comes to changing body composition. It will only register protein, carbs, fats and micronutrients. But obviously, by consuming your daily intake from ice cream only you are not taking your health into consideration, because you will not consume adequate amounts of micronutrients, even though you might experience weight loss. But consuming majority of your daily intake from nutrient rich foods and having ice cream in moderation, will NOT make you gain weight, as long as it is within your individual macro and caloric limit.

What happens when you don't eat enough?

As contradictive as it sounds, you will not lose weight in the long-term by going on a low-calorie diet and it may have extremely bad consequences for your physical and mental health. During periods of caloric restriction you will experience decreases in the hormones leptin, testosterone and insulin, as well as T3 and T4, our thyroid hormones. Meanwhile, the hormones ghrelin and cortisol will be elevated.

The body interprets a decline in blood leptin as starvation, in turn the secretion of ghrelin is increased, "the hunger hormone". It makes you hungrier by promoting gastric emptying. At the same time, low levels of leptin and insulin increases your smelling capabilities and sweet tasting abilities. You will crave sugary and fatty foods and are more prone to eventually binge eat. Binge eating makes you feel guilty or like a failure, which in turn leads to giving up. Not. Sustainable.

Several studies have found a strong relationship between when people go on restrictive diets and the development of binge eating disorder. Many people go on hardcore diets and then use their decreased leptin levels as an excuse to binge eat, or having a "re-feed" or cheat meal/cheat day, to increase their leptin levels and speed their metabolism up again. But if you never deprive yourself of your favourite foods and never restrict your calories to that extent, you will never decrease your leptin levels and never need to re-feed (binge eat) to increase them back again. Nor will you need to satisfy your cravings by "cheating", because you won't have any.

Another hormone that is affected by caloric restriction is cortisol, more commonly known as a stress hormone. Chronically elevated cortisol levels have negative effects on your health, by partially shutting down your immune system, elevating blood pressure and upsetting your digestive system, among other things. It also slows down your metabolism, by decreasing thyroid hormone production.

Negative effects of restricting carbs and/or fats

As I mentioned earlier, insufficient intake of fats affects your hormone production. The balance between estrogen and progesterone will be out of whack and testosterone production will be lowered. This goes for both men and women and all these factors not only inhibits your fat loss and prevents muscle gain, but it will negatively effect your mental well-being and sex drive.

When you don't consume enough carbohydrates to provide you with energy for your workouts, your performance will suffer. You will struggle to maintain, let alone improve strength, speed, agility, endurance and so on. And did you know that your brain is dependent on glycogen to function as well? This means that just like you will not be able to perform physically, your mental performance will suffer as well. Being motivated and in a positive mental state is equally important when it comes to improving performance, and body composition.

Contact me now and lets get started! You don't know how to count macros? Not a problem, that's what I'm here for, to educate you, make everything simple and help you reach your goals by finding what is sustainable for you.

www.eatforperformance.com

Some further reading and references:
Pasiakos, S. M., Caruso, C. M., Kellogg, M. D., Kramer, F. M., & Lieberman, H. R. (2011). Appetite and Endocrine Regulators of Energy Balance After 2 Days of Energy Restriction: Insulin, Leptin, Ghrelin, and DHEA-S. Obesity (19307381), 19(6), 1124-1130.
Williams, G. (2016). Binge Eating and Binge Eating Disorder in Athletes: A Review of Theory and Evidence. Sport Journal, 1.
Heaney, J. J., Carroll, D., & Phillips, A. C. (2014). Physical Activity, Life Events Stress, Cortisol, and DHEA: Preliminary Findings That Physical Activity May Buffer Against the Negative Effects of Stress. Journal Of Aging & Physical Activity, 22(4), 465-473.
http://breakingmuscle.com/health-medicine/the-ups-and-downs-of-cortisol-what-you-need-to-know