IIFYM (If It Fits Your Macros) - Getting Started

As I've said before.  I'm not an expert.  I don't pretend to be.  I'm not a big fan of diets or weight loss programs, mostly because I want to be able to eat the foods I want.  That's why IIFYM makes sense to me and appeals to me.  The diet plan that I was given at the gym by the 'nutrition consultant' is based on this principle and I decided to do my own homework and see how it works and try and work out my own meal plans that fit my goals.

I've done a lot of googling and reading online to try and figure out how to do this.  There's a lot of information out there and it doesn't all agree.  Here's what I did and how I started.

Google brought me to Skinny Meg, someone I already follow and find very inspirational, and brought me to this post - IIFYM - Getting Started.  Some of what I'm going to say I'm going to steal from Meg, some is a combination of many websites.  I think you need to do what works for you and a lot of IIFYM (also called Flexible Dieting) is finding what works for you and your body.

The biggest challenge I've had is finding a Macros Calculator that made sense.  The one Meg shared was actually really helpful so I'm copying her.  Here's what everything looks like when I fill it in

 

I'm basing some of this information on what the nutrition consultant told me previously.  The protein number is a little lower than what she had mentioned - I think she had me closer to .9g but I'm going to try working with 0.8g and see how that works.  This is all about what your body responds well to.

One of the big challenges I've found with this is there's no eating back of exercise calories.  MyFitnessPal, which I use religiously to track my food, encourages eating back.  This calculator works in how much you're working out already (you'll see that if you change your activity level) so you get what it tells you and that's it!

For right now, I'm still on the meal plan the Diet Consultant (or whatever she is) gave me, but I'm going to start trying to plan my own meals based on these numbers and go from there.  I love the idea of being able to work in a trip to Menchies or that weekend beer or wine.