Knowing and using are two different things, knowing you just ate a weeks worth of calories in a half tub of peanut butter is different to planning your intake and getting proactive. This article is about understanding how to manipulate you protein, carb and fat intake to hit your performance and physique goals.

The most basic of things to do in the world when it comes do diet is count your calories. Its a simple thing, truly. Every piece of food you eat will have a nutritonal info panel that will give you a breakup of how many calories are per serve or per 100 grams. Even fruits, vegetables and meats have nutritional info online by the bucket loads. But there is a more simple way than this that works for me and that is to understand the per gram calorie count. Per gram of protein there is 4 calories, per gram of Carbs there is 4 calories and per gram of fats there are 9 calories. Its that simple. Every gram of food has those three things in it and therefore every gram has the equivalent calories. If you eat a half kilo steak in one sitting 500grams x 4 calories is 2000 calories (likely alot more calories because there is probably a big wad of fat in that cheap shit restaurant steak) and your eating too much. Its very VERY simple math. But knowing and using are two different things, knowing you just ate a weeks worth of calories in a half tub of peanut butter is different to planning your intake and getting proactive.

To get proactive with your calories you have to workout what levels of macro nutrients you want in your diet. Hi-Carb, low-Carb, High-Protein, High Fat, Atkins, lemon detox even Mr Magoriums Wonder diet is all simply a ratio of protein to carbs to fats in total calories. This ratio is where understanding the per gram calorie count gets useful.

Lets run thorugh a scenario, if you want to eat 2200 calories a day total and want to go high-protein you might want 50% of calories from protein, 30% of that carbs and 20% of that fats. Breaking it down you want 1100 calories from protein, 660 cals from carbs and 440 cals from fats. In grams according to the per gram calorie count we need 275 grams of protein, 165 grams of carbs and 49 grams of fat for the day.

As a formula if you need it (2200*50%)/4calories = 275 for protein, (2200*30%)/4calories= 165 for carbs and (2200*20%)/9calories = 49 for fats.

Now that we know roughly how much of each macro nutrient to consume we can set about creating a food plan for the day. This is the best approach for beginners and intermediates when it comes to planning and preparing a diet. Forget everything else, forget the food pyramid (which is more about economics than good nutrition, our country is literally built on breads and cereals but your body is literally made of lean meat) forget detox, retox and hairy lemon thousand pounds per week fads. Stop paying money for all the crap, the quickest fix occurs when you start working on the problem.

Stay Tuned for Article 2 where I get detailed and start to work through vitamins and minerals and what part they play in the overall diet.