ROCKING MACROS WITH KATIE D

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!