How To Track Macros

In 3 Simple Steps
The 7-day guide to learning to track like a
total pro

stevevenmkemp.com
Introduction ....................................................... 3
Should you care about tracking macros? ........................... 3
Why track? ....................................................................................................................... 4
Who should use this guide? ............................................................................................ 4
How to use this guide ...................................................................................................... 4

Step 1 - Day 1 to 3 .............................................. 6

Tracking basics and building awareness ............................ 6
Tools of the trade ............................................................................................................ 6
Getting Started - very important ..................................................................................... 6
Start to track .................................................................................................................... 6
Weighing things from a tub or jar ................................................................................... 7
How to search in MyFitnessPal ....................................................................................... 9

Step 2 - Day 4 to 5 ............................................ 10

Hitting calorie and protein targets .................................... 10
Important points............................................................................................................. 11

Step 3 - Day 6 to 7 ............................................. 12

Hitting macros within a range and how to track fibre ..... 12
Does fibre count towards my carb total? ...................................................................... 13
How much? .................................................................................................................. 13
How do those calculations work? ................................................................................ 14
Number Nerds ................................................................................................................15
2 ways to hit ranges ........................................................................................................15

Bonus step ........................................................ 16

Meal planning and creating recipes with MyFitnessPal ..16
Saving meals with MyFitnessPal ................................................................................... 16
Creating recipes with MyFitnessPal .............................................................................. 16
What to do if the recipe needs to be cooked ................................................................. 20

Summing Up..................................................... 21
What to do now..................................................................... 21
Chapter One

Introduction
Should you care about tracking macros?
I received another frustrated email from my client.

I don't understand why I'm not losing weight on these calories. Is

there something wrong with my metabolism?

I reassured her again that there was nothing wrong, but I was starting to wonder what was
up.

We'd been working together for some time. Although things went well at first, I'd slashed
her calories since her initial weight loss. She still wasn't losing at the rate I expected.

She was the type of client who enjoyed the control that tracking gave her. She had no
issues getting out the food scale and her phone. She showed up every day, logged her
food, and got it done.

Adherence was not the problem. It was something else.

I'd asked her to send me a food diary several times, and it all seemed on point. But my
spidey sense was tingling. Something else was up.

This time, instead of writing down what she'd had, I asked her to send me a full day's
eating in MyFitnessPal.

And there was the answer.

Her tracking was off. To the tune of 400kcal per day.

One or two simple mistakes, repeated daily, resulted in fat loss completely stalling.

Not only was there a problem with her tracking, but me cutting her Calories further was
affecting her psychologically too.

Eating a very low-calorie diet can be draining, even if its not true.

The above scenario has been repeated so many times I decided to write a guide for my
clients.

This is how the guide youre reading now came about.

Why track?
Depending on who you talk to, tracking macros can be the most natural thing in the
world. To others, it can feel foreign. It's not for everyone long term, but you can learn a
lot from at least two weeks of it, as long as youre doing it right.

There are two main reasons my clients track macros.

1. Awareness for you. Learning how many calories and macronutrients are in the
food you eat gives you a skill for life. Its also a form of self-monitoring which is an
important component of fat loss or muscle gain.

2. As a tool for me. If you can track what you eat, I can make changes to your diet
with extreme precision. In the short term at least, this will give you better results.

And this is where we get to a key point right at the offset; what is the best way to do it?
Thats what this guide is about.

Who should use this guide?

If youve never tracked macros before but want to become a pro in a week

If you have tried tracking macros before but it didnt work the way you wanted it to

If youre not sure if you should weigh food raw or cooked, or how to count fibre

If you already track but think you might be less accurate at it than you like and want to
take it to pro-mode quickly

If youre not sure how much protein, fat, and carbs to eat

If you want to eat a diet of pop tarts, whey protein, and peanut butter and still get
shredded. Just kidding.

How to use this guide

See this guide as a roadmap to tracking macros like a total pro. Here's how you'll do it.

Read the whole thing through twice

 Do the lessons in order

Don't skip bits or move forward faster than the guide takes you.

The lessons are as follows:

1. Day 1 to 3: Tracking basics and building awareness

2. Day 4 to 5: Hitting calorie and protein targets

3. Day 6 to 7: Hitting macros within a range and how to track fibre

4. Week 2 and beyond bonus lesson: Meal planning and creating recipes with
MyFitnessPal

The following will take you through seven days of macro tracking. After which, you'll be a
pro for life.

As with most things, it starts with building Awareness

Chapter 2

Step 1 - Day 1 to 3
Tracking basics and building awareness

Tools of the trade

I recommend using the app MyFitnessPal, but MyMacros+ is a good second choice.
Download it onto your phone.

If you dont have one, get a cheap digital food scale like this one.

Getting Started - very important

Please pay attention to this. Ignore all the stuff it says about how much you should eat, or
what your goal weight should be. Were using this as a tool to track how much youre
eating and nothing more.

Start to track
Start to track what youre eating. Dont worry about the amounts or numbers. Eat, and
track as you go.

Dont fall into the trap of ignoring things because you dont think they shouldnt be in your
diet. That cheeky chocolate bar you ate at the petrol station, or the packet of M&Ms you
engulfed on the way out the door.

Track it all, and track it without judgment.

Here are the A,B,Cs of tracking. Ok, the A,B,C,D, and Es, but you know what Im saying.

A. Weigh food raw before cooking.

B. Weigh food in grams.

C. If you're weighing fruit, weigh the bit your eating. Take the skin off the banana, and
scoop the flesh out of the avocado.
D. When you eat a food that comes from a packet, use your phone and the barcode
scanner in the app to scan the food.

E. Weigh ingredients one by one. Don't try to make a lasagne and then search for
lasagne. This will bring up a million different results, none of which will match what
youre about to eat. Well go through meal planning to make this way more simple in a
later lesson.

Weighing things from a tub or jar

This seems simple I know. But the number of times I have seen people get this wrong
means it requires special attention.

YOU PUT THE JAR/BOWL OR WHATEVER FOOD CONTAINING VESSEL ON THE SCALE.

You switch the scale on, and the scale reads zero.
YOU TAKE OUT THE THINGS. THE SCALE READS MINUS THE NUMBER OF GRAMS OF THE THINGS YOU
TOOK OUT I.E. -20G.

You keep going until you have taken the right number of grams out.

Feel free to lick the spoon. Youve already measured it.

How to search in MyFitnessPal
As you're still building awareness at this point, I need to make one thing crystal clear.

MyFitnessPal has one major flaw, in that it allows people to add foods to its
database. This is bad for a few reasons:

People are not always that bright

People make mistakes

Thus, a lot of foods you search for in MyFitnessPal will be wrong.

Don't panic. I've got a fix.

Using the USDA search term

USDA stands for the U.S. Department of Agriculture. It features the most up to date and
accurate food composition database.

Adding the term USDA to a food means that it's on MyFitnessPal by way of the food
database. That has improved the chances of it being accurate. Here's how you do it.

Use if the food is a non-packaged animal or plant product

Search for the type of food then add USDA

e.g.

chicken breast, raw, skinless, USDA

"Broccoli, raw, USDA

"Banana, raw, USDA"

Chapter 3

Step 2 - Day 4 to 5
Hitting calorie and protein targets
You may have noticed that the app doesnt just show you how many calories you ate. On
top of that, you've got grams of protein, fat, and carbs.

These are the macros.

Calories are by far the most important aspect of a diet, but macros are important
too. How you recover, grow, and perform in the gym are important
considerations. Macros play a large part.

Its worth paying attention to them.

Lets start with protein.

I want you to start aiming for a pre-determined calorie amount per day. Here's how you'll
do it.

Write down how many calories you ate over the first 3 days.

Add the three numbers together.

Divide by 3.

This is your average intake. Stick with this number for now.

I also want you to start eating a target amount of protein per meal every day. Here's how.

Take your bodyweight in kilograms and times by 2

That number is how many grams of protein to eat.

e.g. 70kg x 2 = 140g protein

Divide that number by how many meals you eat per day

e.g. 140g / 4 meals per day = 35g per meal

 - Uncooked beef/ chicken/ pork/ lamb/ fish 100g = 20-25g of protein.

- One large egg = around 7-8g protein 5g fat.

- Egg whites = 4g protein.

- Low fat cottage cheese/ 0% fat Total Greek Yoghurt 100g = around 10g of protein.

- Beans/ lentils = will contain about 10g protein per 100g of cooked amount.

Important points

Starches, vegetables, nuts and nut butter, all contain small amounts of protein too.
These all count towards your protein target.

Aim to hit most of your protein target per meal with quality protein.

This is can be where tracking stops for some people. Anything beyond this point is the
nitty-gritty.

Tracking total calories and protein is also your go-to option if you cant track all the
macros successfully in one day. This is often what a lot of people end up doing most often
when theyve been tracking for a while.

Dont worry about perfection just yet. Try to get the numbers of calories within 100 of
your target, and the protein within 5g per meal.
Chapter 4

Step 3 - Day 6 to 7
Hitting macros within a range and how to
track fibre
Were now going to finish by going over the steps to full macro tracking.

Weve got as far as total calories and protein, so lets fill the rest in with carbs and fat.

The different macros contain different amounts of energy per gram. Instead of total
calories and protein, you're now going to track everything to see where it adds up.

Protein = 4kcal/g

Carbs = 4kcal/g

Fat = 9kcal/g

Track carbs.

The majority of these will come from starches, fruit, and vegetables.

Some dairy products also have a fair amount of carbs in them.

You're already hitting total calories, so at this stage, you're not trying to hit a specific
amount.

Track it all and take note of the total amount by the end of the day.

Track fat.

Small amounts of fat will be in pretty much everything.

If youre tracking fatty meat, remember to weigh it raw first and use the search field with
USDA to look it up.
Does fibre count towards my carb total?
Fibre doesnt have quite as many calories as regular carbs due to how its digested.

This can be confusing for some people. My usual tip is to not worry about it.

You might look at the number of macronutrients youve hit, and wonder why the calories
dont quite add up.

This is because youre counting total carbs. But, the plant foods you have eaten contain
fibre.

Although they get counted as total carbs, the fibre has less energy. The calories in fibre
add up to roughly 2kcal/g, so the numbers seem like don't quite make sense.

For example

- 300g of carbs should add up to 1,200kcal.

- If youve also eaten 38g of fibre, 300g of carbs in your app might add up to
1,124kcal.

Not that much difference, and not worth worrying about unless you eat a huge amount of
fibre.

How much?
If you were getting 2g/kg of protein and hitting total Calories, how many grams of fat and
carbs did you eat?

Now that you have those numbers, you can start to create a diet that suits your goals and
the way you like to eat.

Stick with 2g protein per kg of bodyweight

Set fat somewhere between 20% - 40% of total Calories

Make up the rest from carbs

e.g.

70kg body weight, eating 2,350kcal

 140g protein

52 to 104g fat

213g to 330g of carbs

How do those calculations work?

Example 1 - 20% fat

2,350 is your total amount of calories

140g protein * 4 = 560kcal

20% total Calories as fat is 2,350 * 0.2 = 470

470 / 9 = 52

560 + 470 = 1,030

2,350 - 1,030 = 1,320

1,320 / 4 = 330g carbs

Protein = 140g, Fat = 52g, Carbs = 330g, Kcal = 2,350

Example 2 - 40% fat

2,350 is your total amount of calories

140g protein * 4 = 560kcal

40% total Calories as fat is 2,350 * 0.4 = 940

940 / 9 = 104

560 + 940 = 1,500

2,350 - 1,500 = 850

 850 / 4 = 213g carbs

Protein = 140g, Fat = 104g, Carbs = 213g, Kcal = 2,350

Number Nerds
Tracking protein, carbs, and fat to the nearest gram is not needed or recommended. It's
much better to have target ranges.

These ranges will be more narrow or wide depending on your goals.

Dont worry about getting it bang on.

Stay within the ranges, or fall back to total calories and protein if things dont go quite to
plan.

Aim to get close to total Calories by the end of the day

Hit protein, carbs, and fat within a range

2 ways to hit ranges

Hit macros 5g, 10g, or 20g, above or below the target

Hit total Calories

or

Hit a minimum of 1.8g protein

Hit a minimum of 20% of fat

Hit total Calories

Chapter 5

Bonus step
Meal planning and creating recipes with
MyFitnessPal
Finally, lets get to the bonus step. Youre almost there at this point. This is just the final
piece of the puzzle to becoming a complete pro.

Saving meals with MyFitnessPal

Lets say you eat pretty much the same breakfast every day. Instead of adding the
component ingredients every single time, you can save the foods as a meal.

Start by adding the foods one by one.

Save each addition in MyFitnessPal as a meal.

Whenever you eat this meal, add it to the diary in the app and youre all set.

If you want to change one ingredient in a meal, change it in the diary once youve added
the meal.

Creating recipes with MyFitnessPal

Batch cooking for the week or a few days is another great way to automate and simplify
your diet.

This avoids common traps. Searching MyFitnessPal for "casserole" won't cut it.

Although this might seem like a few steps, once youve done it youre set.

Go to the recipe section and give your recipe a name.

Add ingredients raw and note the number of servings.
Save the recipe.
What to do if the recipe needs to be cooked
Sometimes, your recipe needs to be cooked in one go. This means that it can be a different
weight after its cooked due to water losses. No problem. Heres what you should do.

1. Batch cook it.

2. Put a bowl or plate on a scale

3. Switch the scale on so the reading is zero

4. Transfer the food

5. Divide the weight by the number of portions in your recipe.

6. If its 10 portions and the final weight is 1,500g, then each portion is 150g.

Thats it.
Chapter 5

Summing Up
What to do now
Tracking macros is not a difficult process, it just takes a certain knack. If you followed the
information in this guide you can now track macros like a total pro. You can choose to do
it all of the time, some of the time, or only in special situations. Whatever you choose to
do, you can be confident that you wont be making any 400kcal slip-ups from now on.