Calorie and Macronutrient Needs

A step-by-step guide to single-digit body fat

How do I determine my calorie intake?

Does it matter what percentage of my diet is made up of protein, carbs, and fats?

I’m going to explain why it’s relevant and how to easily put that knowledge into action. Before we get into specific strategies, let’s clarify the importance of total energy intake and macronutrients for our body composition efforts. You are much more likely to benefit from this article if you understand the reasoning behind my approach.

Food provides us with the raw materials and energy we need for normal physiologic function. Think of it as building a brick wall: we require the supplies necessary to construct the wall and energized workers to actually build it. However, it’s unlikely you suffer from a shortage of options to supply that energy, but rather how to appropriately select healthy sources of it. As you stroll through your grocery store, glancing at the nutrition facts listed on the back of a handful of items selecting the right one for you can be a daunting and confusing proposition. For now, let's establish what these numbers mean for your efforts to lose body fat. 

Part of the problem is related to nutrition research in general. Science requires the ability to control and replicate variables, but no two natural food items are exactly the same. Two apples may look similar but can vary in their nutrient profile. Consequently, labs dedicated to this research tend to focus on the effects isolated nutrients have on our bodies, and so we’re still unclear on how this picture changes when nutrients are consumed together in their natural form. Our tunnel-vision focus on isolated nutrients have made us fall in love with vitamins and dietary supplements, but nothing will ever replace the array of benefits offered by whole foods.

Given nutrition’s influential role in human health, it’s important to understand some basic nutritional terms before moving on. These will be helpful in understanding the strategies I will recommend in this article.

• Metabolism:
• Defined: The chemical processes that make the energy contained in food available to the body. Our metabolism converts food into the resources required for muscle activity, repair and remodeling, digestion and absorption functionality in the GI tract, synthesis of new substances in the cell, etc.
• Energy in Food - Calories
• Defined: a calorie is the energy it takes to raise the temperature of 1 gram of water by 1 degree Celsius. Okay but what does that mean for us?
• “Calorie” is simply how we quantify the amount of energy contained within a particular nutrient. Through metabolic processes the body converts the energy contained in food into a universal “Energy Currency” that can be used in a variety of physiologic functions. This form of capital is called – ATP (Adenosine Triphosphate).
• Macronutrients
• Defined: group of chemical compounds essential for supplying energy for growth, metabolism, and other bodily functions.
• Main Classifications: Protein, Carbohydrates, and Fats
• Micronutrients
• Defined: essential compounds needed only in minimal amounts, not to serve as energy but to support a variety of biological functions. 
• Common Functions: enhance immune response, modulate free radical production, and repair damaged DNA.
• Main Classifications: Vitamins, Minerals, and phytonutrients.

Although the required amounts of macronutrients and micronutrients can vary markedly across individuals (depending on body size, age, activity level, pregnancy, fitness goals etc.), each essential nutrient is necessary in some capacity to avoid metabolic impairments.

Nutrition’s complexity perpetuates the debate between dietary paradigms – no one truly understands for certain how nutrition impacts human health. As you consider various dietary fat loss strategies, you might wonder:

• Do I have to count calories in order to lose weight?
• Should I just focus on eliminating carbohydrates or sugar from my diet?

Seeking answers to these questions amidst a landscape of contradictory information can easily result in further confusion.  In this chapter, I want to offer clarity while providing you a streamlined way to determine:

• Whether counting calories is a useful strategy for your weight loss goals
• How many calories should you eat?
• How much protein, carbs and fat do you need to eat in order to lose body fat & gain muscle?

“This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You finish this article - the story ends, you wake up in your bed, looking down at a compromised version of yourself. Continue reading - you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes.” – Morpheus, The Matrix (paraphrased).

The strategies that follow are presented as options. You can choose to leverage this newly acquired knowledge or continue implementing the very strategies (or lack thereof) that may have led you to this article in the first place.    

Energy Balance. Losing weight involves burning more calories than you consume [2]. The general concept of energy balance is illustrated in Figure 1:

Put simply, if you want to lose weight you will need to maintain a “negative energy balance” (c) overall. Let’s put it this way: if you are supplying your body with sufficient calories to support daily function, there is no reason for your body to tap into internal fat stores specifically deposited for times of energy shortage. In the long run, this simple reality is true regardless of how many carbohydrates are in your breakfast cereal or how much grass-fed butter is in your coffee. So before you run to throw away all the carbohydrates in your pantry, understand that energy balance plays an essential role.

While it’s true that to lose weight you must burn more calories than you consume, it is possible to consume a surplus on some days while continuing to lose weight, as long as you reduce caloric intake on other days to even things out. This is your chance to indulge now while still improving overall. Of course, taking advantage of this dietary “hack” first requires that you know your daily calorie needs.

Counting Calories is a useful tool, but NOT Required. Counting calories is not universally effective, and some have even found it harmful to their fitness goals. At ShyTown, we have guided countless members through fitness transformations without them ever counting a single calorie. Though in some ways, calorie counting resembles a more balanced perspective, it can be quite rigid in other ways.

Alternatively, not having a general awareness of the calories you consume while trying to lose weight can imply a process of elimination. In some cases, this leads you to cutting out a nutrient like carbs or a food that’s not produced a certain way, as with organic and gluten-free diets. Although casting a wide net of exclusion can have important effects on health and metabolic aliments, when it comes to weight loss, we are still bound by the laws of thermodynamics. If you want to shed pounds, it’s often better to focus on your day-to-day energy equation – energy in, energy out – than it is to cut out large groups of food.

For instance, let’s say we remove all gluten from your diet. Because of how many foods contain gluten, you may experience weight loss due simply to the overall reduction of energy you’re consuming. However, such extreme dietary practices can present problems for long-term adherence as the nutritional framework becomes overwhelmingly limited.

I don’t know about you, but I want to maintain the ability to indulge in treats from time to time, which helps me feel less restricted by diet and therefore makes it easier to eat well overall. As you’ll learn in Chapter Five, a food’s true impact on your health is mainly determined by how much of it you eat. However, I recommend eating mostly nutrient-rich whole foods. Primarily, this means food without sugar added during processing and contains it’s natural abundance of essential nutrients. These nutritionally conscious selections will provide a cascade of benefits, including satiety, metabolic health, hormonal balance, and cognitive clarity.

To ensure your progress is sustainable, you want to maintain a flexible approach that accommodates your life, not the other way around. Doing so will require you to document your daily consumption patterns at least for a period of time. I’ll show you how to do this with an easy-to-use food tracking technique that will cause you to naturally gravitate toward more nutritious food.  

You can still enjoy guilt-free NFL Sundays with your buddies or unrestricted dinner and wine with your significant other. Once you know how much room you have to work with while still maintaining an energy deficit, you’ll be able to modify your diet to reflect real-world circumstances.

In time, you’ll develop an intuition for what your body needs and when. When that happens, you’ll be able to stop tracking and rely instead on your enhanced awareness of the food you consume and its value for your body.

If you have a more modest fat loss goal, you may choose to simply set broad calorie ranges and protein targets, using the nutritional information on the back of food items to keep a running estimate of the day’s totals. It’s important to note that if you follow my previous recommendation to consume primarily whole foods, those items won’t come with nutrition information, and so you’ll still need some knowledge of various foods’ calorie and protein contents. 

Nonetheless, these overarching ranges may look like depending on your gender, age, weight, and goals:

1. Calorie Target:

• 300 – 500 kcals per meal, or
• 1200 – 1500 kcals daily

1. Protein Target:

• 20 – 25g per meal (palm full of lean protein source), or
• 1g of protein per lb. of body weight daily

Whether you choose to use an intuitive approach with wide ranges or detailed nutrient tracking, I am going to show you how to calculate your unique energy requirements in an easy-to-follow three-step process:

1. Step 1: Determine calorie intake for weight loss – using a simple multiplier.
2. Step 2: The macronutrient blueprint – how much protein, carbs, and fat do you need?
3. Step 3: How to adjust macronutrients to perpetuate fat loss.

Taking the time to follow these steps will keep you in control of your health, enabling you to achieve and maintain any degree of physical transformation long into the future.   

Determining your calorie needs

All of the equations that follow are estimations based on the available scientific literature and decades of experience.  As a coach, I view these simplified models as a starting point, where your goals are concerned. These formulas give results that are accurate enough while avoiding the unnecessary complexity associated with more elaborate equations.

First, let’s establish your maintenance calorie needs, defined as the calories required to maintain your current weight. 

Energy in = Energy out.

Simple Maintenance Calorie Multiplier:

Female: 12 - 14 calories per pound of body weight

Male: 14 - 16 calories per pound of body weight

[Evan: 14 calories x 200 lbs. = 2,800 calorie-maintenance level]

Since our goal is to help you lose a significant amount of body fat, we will stick to the lower end of the given calorie range, using 12 and 14 as our baseline for women and men, respectively. This estimation accounts for several factors that influence energy expenditure: the energy cost of activity, food digestion, and normal physiologic function.

Female: 12 calories x YOUR body weight = maintenance calories

Male: 14 calories x YOUR body weight = maintenance calories

After you’ve determined your estimated starting point, if you haven’t already, begin tracking your food intake using any of the available software or apps designed to make it easy (e.g. MyFitnessPal). If you intend to maintain significant fat loss this is an important component. After all, what good are these numbers if you have no idea how to identify your intake in the first place?

The macronutrient blueprint. WHAT should you eat? 

Now that you know your maintenance calories, it’s time to learn how to determine your macronutrient needs.

Why is this important?\

It is critical we do our best to ensure the majority of our weight loss is coming from body fat. The proportion of macronutrients in your diet can be manipulated to maximize fat loss while preserving muscle.

Think of your macronutrient mix as a recipe – with the right balance of ingredients, you’ll end up with a delicious recipe for health.

Although the pounds falling off the scale are dependent on total energy balance, whether those losses originate from fat or muscle can be influenced by the type of food you consume. How then do you ensure you’re choosing foods that encourage fat loss?

First of all, it’s important to understand that your body is predominantly reliant on carbohydrates or fat to meet the daily energy requirements of simply living. Which one your body needs most at a given time will be determined by two primary factors:

1. Exercise Intensity

• Higher intensity exercise = more reliance on carbohydrates during exercise.
• Lower intensity exercise = more reliance on fat during exercise.

1. Nutritional Macronutrient Composition

• Limited availability of either carbs or fats increases reliance on the other.

We discussed exercise’s influence on weight loss in Chapter Two. Let’s focus on the influence of diet by examining one of the classically proposed weight loss solutions. When people advocate “low-carbohydrate diets” what they’re actually promoting is limiting one of the two dominant fuel sources in an attempt to lose fat. As I just mentioned, by reducing carbohydrates you increase your body’s dependence on other fuels, such as fat.

“Okay, great,” you might think. “If I keep carbs low enough I’ll increase how much fat my body burns, right?” Not so fast. Just because we’re metabolizing more fat doesn’t mean we’re losing body fat. If we don’t pay attention to calories and we overcompensate for the reduction in carbohydrates with an increase in dietary fat, your body will use the ingested fat for energy and it will never get around to burning your internal energy stores. In such a case, although we’ve created an environment primed for fat burning by reducing carbs, we’re simply providing our body with exogenous calorie sources to meet energy demands. This is where overall calorie balance comes back into play.

Your choice between macronutrients can dictate fuel usage (carbs or fat) but it does not dictate where that fuel originates (internal or external sources of energy). Calories determine that.

Some of the success produced by the low-carb approach is partly due to the sheer number of foods that are high in carbohydrates – a phenomenon I touched on earlier. Additionally, low-carb dieters appear to experience an improved ability to manage daily eating patterns since they experience less variation in blood sugar that would otherwise be a consequence of consuming carbohydrate-heavy meals. Accordingly, if you follow a low-carb diet you will likely lose weight, at least partially due to the fact that you are now simply consuming less calories.

Because of this factor, low-carb diets can be incredibly effective at reducing body weight. If we can establish the right mix of carbohydrate intake and calorie restriction, we can create a perfect storm for body fat loss. 

To recap, there are two primary dietary influences for body fat loss:

1. Calories in: dictate whether fuel is pulled from internal or dietary energy sources.
2. Macronutrient Composition of those calories – dictate what type of fuel is being used

So how do you determine the amount of carbohydrates, fat, and protein required to encourage body recomposition? It’s surprisingly straightforward.

First, you’ll need to start by identifying your macronutrient needs based on goals, activity level, and lifestyle preference. These can vary massively depending on the person, but I can provide a general framework on how to establish your ideal macronutrient values. For example, I’ve provided reference parameters using hypothetical goals and preferences to determine the general effect it would have on my carbohydrate recommendations.

Goals

Lower Carb<------------------------------------------------------------------------------>Higher Carb

Activity Level

Lower Carb<------------------------------------------------------------------------------>Higher Carb

Taste Preference

Lower Carb<------------------------------------------------------------------------------>Higher Carb

Let's look at my former client Corey M. as an example to clarify the process of determining calorie and macronutrient needs. Corey gained 8 lbs. of muscle and lost 23 lbs. of fat in 8 weeks by using this approach.  After reading through his example, you can input your own characteristics to construct a personalized macronutrient breakdown.

Activity

Moderately active, vigorous weight workouts 4/weekly, no isolated cardiovascular exercise

Goal

> 15 lbs. reduction in body fat, maintain muscle, no performance goals

Weight

175 lbs

Maintenance Calories (body weight x 14-16)

~ 2,450 cals /daily

Lifestyle Preference

Favorite foods are predominantly savory, occasional sweets, enjoys a few cocktails/beers on the weekend

Before we can divvy up Corey’s dietary “pie” into macronutrient proportions, we need to figure out the daily caloric intake that will allow him to reach his goal.

Anyone can effectively initiate weight loss by consuming around 80% of the total they’d need to maintain their body weight. We can skip calculating Corey’s maintenance calories and simply use 80% of our multiplier (provided earlier) to discover how many calories he needs to consume to start losing weight.  Of course, differences across individuals can affect the number of calories required, but if your calculated amount doesn’t result in progress, simply lower your daily calorie intake until the number on the scale starts going down.

Shortcut: Corey’s Body Weight (lbs.) x 11.2 = 1,960 calories

(14 x 80% = 11.2)

From maintenance: 2,450 x 80% = 1,960 calories.

(maintenance calories x 20% reduction = starting weight loss calories)

To implement this effectively, you will need objective measures of progress. This ensures you have accurate information about whether you’re achieving the progress you desire. I recommend using the following process from week to week:

• On Day 1: take baseline measurements of weight and waist circumference. This measurement should be taken first thing upon waking up in the morning – always using the SAME scale to weigh yourself.
• Give it 7 days of consistency at the calorie intake you calculated earlier (80% of your multiplier). Make no changes to diet and exercise midweek even if you start to see changes in the mirror. We need consistency. 
• On morning of day 8, check weight and waist at the same time of day and using the same scale that you used to take your baseline measurements.

Interpreting these measurements:

• Weight Increases = reduce calories by 10% (trying to reestablish baseline)
• No Weight Change = reduce calories by 5% (trying to find necessary deficit)
• Weight Decreases = keep calories the same until plateau

Slow and steady is the trick from here – sometimes it takes time for the body to start responding. Be patient and stay the course. Minor changes can add up to meaningful improvements over the long haul.

Once you’ve eaten at a deficit for a long period and/or you’re approaching single-digit body fat, more extreme reductions might be required to continue progress. Before doing so, it’s important to reflect on the physiologic and lifestyle costs of imposing extreme dietary stress. The list of potential consequences is exhaustive and complex and including it here is beyond the scope of this chapter. But trust me, you’ll know when the sacrifices required to continue progressing no longer mesh with the life you envisioned at the beginning of this journey. Fortunately, transformative improvements in body composition can be achieved without any intention of standing on a bodybuilding stage at 4% body fat.

Now that you’re eating at a caloric deficit we can dive into how exactly we’re going to manipulate macronutrients to encourage fat loss, performance, recovery, and training adaptations.

Macronutrient determination (for weight loss): understand these are ranges more than concrete values, and I determine them in the following order:

Input these macronutrient values in the daily goals area on MyFitnessPal (or any tracking software):

Screenshot from MyFitnessPal - customized daily macronutrient goals.

Now you’re off to the races since you have learned how to:

• Calculate weight loss calories
• Select corresponding macronutrients (optimized for goals)

However, there is one final step to ensure we continue to improve. 

How should you adjust your macronutrient proportions as progress begins to plateau?

I’ve got you covered. Going forward, every week you’ll take the simple measurements outlined earlier and ask yourself the questions listed below.  After that, I’ll tell you exactly which macronutrients to reduce in order to continue losing body fat. Once again, the process of implement, wait, measure, and iterate is repeated to see how the body is responding. Here are some useful questions to ask yourself each week:

• What were my weight and waist measurements? Did they increase, stagnate, or decrease since the same day last week?
• Did I hit my macros consistently? It’s okay to fall within 5% of your targets. 
• Rate exercise performance. Since it’s not our primary goal, we simply want to ensure training has been executed with a reasonable degree of intensity. Ask yourself: was I able to use the same or more weight as I have in previous workouts?
• Am I experiencing intense psychological distress or cravings?  If so, you may want to shift your strategy to incorporate more of your favorite foods while staying within your calculated calories. This will support adherence to the program, ultimately leading to your goals.

This personal feedback provides not only a useful index of improvement but also indicates the changes we need to make in order to sustain that progress. If performance in the gym is clearly suffering, you should increase carbohydrates by 15% and reduce fat by 8%. If weight or waist measurements increase, reduce carbs and/or fat by the 10% described earlier. Understandably, these determinations can be tricky as they vary from individual to individual. As long as you adhere consistently to the guidelines we’ve outlined in this chapter, you will be on track to the body you’ve always wanted.

After taking your consistent weekly measurements, below are some suggestions as to how to make appropriate macronutrient reductions and in what order. First, we like to establish a lower limit for each macronutrient, or the amount at which further reductions are no longer recommended. Start with small reductions in carbohydrates and fat, holding protein static. Continue making these modifications until approaching this lower limit. If you have reached the advised lower limit of each macronutrient, I strongly advise you to assess the progress that has been made and refrain from making further reductions. Perhaps at this time, the only other variable to consider changing is exercise (increase resistance training frequency and/or cardiovascular exercise).

You will notice a contrast between the lower limits and the general macronutrient ranges I provided earlier. The values below are absolute minimums; think of them as warnings not recommendations. They are the amounts at which you need to seriously consider halting reductions.

1. Carbohydrates:
2. Modifications: Increments of 5 – 10g
3. Lower limit: 0.3 g / lbs. body weight
4. Fat:
5. Modifications: Increments of 5 - 8g
6. Lower limit: 0.15 g / lbs. body weight
7. Protein:
8. Modifications: Increments of 5 - 10g
9. Lower limit: 0.5 g / lbs. body weight

Although these are general guidelines, the recommendations outlined in this chapter can be applied to enjoy meaningful progress. You now have a road map to systematically approach your body recomposition efforts in a way that leverages the most effective and sustainable strategies.

Take-Home Lessons: 6 step process to reducing body fat

1. Establish calorie needs (multiplier: 14 – 16 calories / pound of body weight)
2. Establish weight loss calories (20% reduction from maintenance or use 11.2 multiplier) 
3. Establish macronutrient profile to optimize goals
4. Assess progress and track consistency
5. Make macronutrient-specific changes based on objective progress measures
6. Identify lower limits, beyond which dieting should be halted