How to Calculate Your Macros for Fat Loss
In this week’s blog I am going to be teaching you how to work out your calories and macros. Firstly, what are macros? Macros stand for macronutrients meaning these are foods we require in our diet and we need them to function, they consist of Proteins, Fats and Carbohydrates (Fibre is included in carbs).
How many calories you consume per day depends on your macronutrient intake. Protein and Carbohydrates have 4 calories per gram, fat is more energy dense and has 9 calories per gram. To help you understand it better let’s say you go food shopping you look at a food label and it reads 15g of protein, 10 grams of carbohydrates and 5 grams of fat.
To work this out all you need to do is:
Multiply 15g of protein by 4 = 60 calories,
Multiply 10g of carbohydrates by 4 = 40 calories,
Multiply 5g of fat by 9 = 45 calories,
Total equalling 145 calories, and that’s how to read labels and work out calories in macronutrients.
So how do you work out your calories and macronutrients? I am going to show you now.
Let’s use an average female (Sarah) as an example who is 45 years old, a height of 162cm and weighing 70kg. Sarah spends most of her day inactive but does take part in exercise a couple of times a week.
So, let’s find out what Sarah’s calorie requirements are and what my BMR (Basal Metabolic Rate) is. This is the number of calories she burns per day, before exercising.
The formulas differ for men and women but here are both equations:
Men 10 x weight (kg) +6.25 x height (cm) – 5 x age + 5
Women 10 x weight (kg) +6.25 x height (cm) – 5 x age – 161
So, for Sarah weighing at 70kg at 162cm tall her BMR would roughly be: (10 x 70) = 1326.
Now to add in the physical activity on top of my BMR. We need to multiply my BMR by her physical activity. Here are the numbers you need to multiply your BMR by:
1.2 if you do little or no activity
1.4 if you exercise a couple times per week
1.5-1.7 if you exercise several times per week 375
1.9 if you exercise every day or have a physical job
Sarah trains 1-2 times per week and but is often sedentary through her working day, so we are going to multiply her BMR by 1.4 this gives her an estimated TDEE (Total Daily Energy Expenditure) of 1875, meaning this is how many calories she burns every day.
To lose fat, Sarah needs to be in a calorie deficit, meaning she will need to eat less calories than she is burning. So, if she was to reduce her calories by 20% she would need multiply her calories 1875 by .20 to get how many calories she needs to eat lose body fat. 1875 x .20 = 375, 1875 – 375 = 1500.
Sarah needs to consume 1500 calories per day to lose body fat.
Now to work out her macros, we will start out with protein first.
Protein is a great macronutrient for when it comes to dropping body fat, it helps preserve muscle and helps to keep you feeling full. A good figure to aim for it to multiply your weight in lbs by .825, for Sarah this will be 127g of protein. If you struggle to hit your protein I recommend buying some whey protein to help.
Fats are next. For your fats you should be aiming for 0.7g-1.2g per kg of body weight. For Sarah at 70kg she would need 56g of fat we were to multiply this by 0.8.
And now finally for everyone’s favourites CARBS!!
So far, we have worked out your protein and fat intake, what we need to do now is work out how many calories our protein and fats take up and see how much is left for carbohydrates. To do this we need to go back to the start of this blog and multiply our protein intake by 4 and our fats by 9. This means that I Sarah is currently getting 508 calories from her protein and 504 calories from her fat equalling 1012 calories so far leaving her 488 calories for carbohydrates which divided by 4 is 122g.
So, in summary Sarah needs:
1500 Calories
127g (508 calories) of protein
56g (504 calories) of fat
122g (488 calories) of carbohydrates
I understand this can be quite confusing, this is the closest estimate you can get without scientific testing, so may need a few minor adjustments. I recommend downloading a calorie counter app to help track your calories. To get your personalised coaching plan including your macros and workout regime please feel free to contact me for a list of options.
I hope this all makes sense and you can benefit from this :)
