Everyone talks about calories when they talk about health and weight loss, but counting your macronutrients is also important for a number of reasons.Â
Macronutrients include protein, carbohydrates, and fat, and knowing the proportion of your calories from each of these calorie sources can help you have the energy that your body needs to go through the day, work out, and stay satiated.
Losing Weight
When you count macros, you can find it easier to lose stubborn weight, stay satisfied, and maintain lean muscle mass. Itâs easier to lose weight because the types of macros you eat can affect your metabolic rate.Â
Having a good blend of macronutrients will also satisfy you for longer because different macros are digested at different rates. Finally, proteins are the best at helping you build muscle mass, but you still need to watch how much you eat to prevent other health problems.
Flexibility When Watching Calories
A lot of people also like counting macros because itâs more flexible than simply saying youâre only going to eat certain kinds of foods and completely denying yourself of others. For instance, when you count macros, you can let yourself have a cookie sometimes without âcheatingâ on your diet as long as it fits within your target macro levels.
Counting Macros to Prevent Disease
One of the best reasons to count your macros is to make sure that youâre getting the nutrition necessary to prevent certain types of diseases. For instance, increasing your protein levels as you get older can lower the risk of getting Alzheimerâs Disease.Â
Additionally, having a diet thatâs full of healthy carbs can prevent developing diabetes and some kinds of heart conditions. You can also avoid having nutritional deficiencies so that you donât get depression or infections.
Changing Your Metabolic Rate
The types of macros that you ingest can affect your metabolic rate, which will affect the rate at which you lose weight. Protein has the greatest ability to raise your metabolic rate. In fact, it can raise it by about 15% to 30%. In contrast, carbohydrates affect the metabolic rate by 5% to 10%, and fat can only affect your metabolic rate by 0% to 3%.Â
Eating plenty of protein isnât an absolute necessity, but according to Legion Athletics, âresearch has proven that high-protein dieting is superior to low-protein dieting in just about every meaningful way,â including aiding in weight loss, gaining muscle, and staying satiated.
Helps With Building Muscle
Knowing which macronutrients youâre consuming is important so that you can grow and maintain your muscle mass. Protein is the most important macronutrient to build and maintain muscle, but at the same time, itâs also important to watch your macronutrients because consuming too much puts you at a higher risk of kidney stones.
If youâre trying to lose weight, or if youâre concerned about your weight or health in general, knowing what youâre eating in macronutrients can help you reach your goals much more quickly. Tracking macronutrients at first might feel like itâs difficult or time-consuming, but once you learn the macronutrients for many of the items that you consume most often, adding up the macronutrients every day will become much easier, and a macros calculator can help.