ROCKING MACROS WITH KATIE D
BY: KATIE DEMETRIFF / KMF MACRO TRACKER
Rocking Macros with Katie
Hi my name is Katie and I track macros. I have been tracking macros for almost a year
now and I love it! I’ve known about the flexible dieting/if it fits my macros phenomenon
for a while now, but couldn’t quite wrap my mind around the whole process. It seemed
so easy according to all the hype but confusing on how to figure out what your macros
are supposed to be and there were more than one way to calculate them. It was super
frustrating and I felt like I am too busy, i just don’t have time to figure all this out.
However during the summer of 2016 I felt as if I was at a loss for trying to lose body fat
and see results in the gym. I was eating “clean” or doing Paleo, but none of seemed to
work. And it isn’t because eating clean or paleo or vegan doesn’t work, they do but your
body is a machine and needs to be fueled as such. I was frustrated and didn’t know
what to do. I had reached out to other people online and it was always the same thing-
just eat this or more of this or cut that or you’re eating too many calories, and the list
goes on and on.
One morning during my cross fit class my coach Pete mentioned how he was tracking
macros and had a nutrition coach Kelli. Immediately following class I started asking
questions and told Pete I was interested in talking to Kelli about macro tracking.
Needless to say this was the beginning of my journey with macro tracking. I reached
out to Kelli a few days later and she had me start tracking what I was eating and then
email her the macros so she could put together what would be my starting macros. I
was excited, hopeful and of course wild ideas of how great i’d look in like two months.
I remember receiving my email from Kelli a few days after I submitted my spreadsheet, I
was so excited! Then I started reading through all she had sent and started to feel
overwhelmed, like how am i supposed to do all this? I printed out all the documents she
sent me, minus the spreadsheet and sat down and read through everything. I thought I
understood it all but of course still had questions. And of course I skimmed over some
thing, which resulted in an email from Kelli (in all caps, so I thought she was yelling at
me) telling me I needed to hit my fats within one gram. Huh? I’m supposed to eat all
the fats? (Now let me say I don’t mind fats in my diet and never could get on the low fat
diet train. Plus I knew I needed to have fats in my diet in order to burn fats.) And mind
you I was traveling for work the second week of tracking macros; which for a beginner
macro tracker that meant a lot of haphazard tracking or “hap” tracking as Kelli calls it.
So I drove on with my macro tracking the best I could for the remaining time I was
traveling. When I arrived home I went straight to the paperwork Kelli had sent me and
sat down for a more thorough reading.
I read and I re-read the pdf files she sent and some of it started to sink in a bit better.
Some of the left and right limits of macro tracking were starting to sink in and others
would make sense later. I say this because although we read, hear or think we know
something sometimes we don’t have the “ah-ha’ moment until much later. I think this
has to do with when we are ready to hear something and actually listen to it, therefore it
makes sense. Of course this leaves us wondering how we even trudged through the
task before because we are so much more enlightened now. So after my second

carbs, they needed to be within 10 grams. Which meant that if my goal of protein for
the day is 150 g then I could eat somewhere between 140-160 g of protein. Kelli would
prefer over but that we need to be consistent. And by that she meant I need to be close
to 150 g every day, if i am short grams or slightly over for the day, that’s ok but lets not
aim for that every day. You have to approach every day as a new start, so my goal is
150 g of protein and I try to get it almost exact. It took me some time to figure out how
to really hone in on getting those three zeros across my daily page on My FItness Pal,
but I figured it out. Don’t worry I shall share with you all.
Since the holidays are right around the corner, starting with my favorite Halloween, I will
be talking about my first macro tracking Thanksgiving and how I stayed on track as well
as my plans for this holiday season. Along the way I will have some blogs here and
there with some of my favorite macro treats to make and my go to snacks.
Happy tracking!