Accelerate Your Fat Loss by Adjusting Your Macros
Do you lose weight too slowly? You can accelerate your fat loss by fine-tuning the percentage of carbs, proteins, and fats you’re eating.
Here’s how to do it…
Accelerate Your Fat Loss by Tweaking Your Macros [Video]
In this video, I share what it means to adjust your macros as well as a place for you to start. I also tell you how you can boost your fat loss with a few additional tweaks.
Would you rather read than watch a video? If so, then please read on…
What’s a Macro?
Macros are the abbreviated (and cool) way of saying macronutrients.
Macronutrients are the nutrients that provide your body with energy in the form of calories.
There are three macronutrients: Protein, Fat, and Carbs.
Protein is used by your body to build things like muscles, hormones, and antibodies.
Fats are very satisfying foods and great for cutting down on hunger and cravings.
Carbs are turned to sugar in your body, which is a quick energy source but also causes a rise in insulin.
How Carbs and Insulin are Linked to Fast (or Slow) Fat Loss
Insulin’s job is to store calories in your body, so you have energy available at times when we aren’t eating.
Many people who are slow losers have trouble with insulin resistance, meaning that years of overeating carbohydrates have caused their cells to become less sensitive to insulin.
Insulin resistance is linked to high carb diets, particularly if you eat a lot of refined carbs, such as bread, cereal, muffins, pretzels, and other processed snack foods.
With this lack of sensitivity, the nutrients you eat are not leaving the blood and moving into your cells causing sugar and insulin to pile up in your blood.
That accumulation of insulin is the exact opposite of what you want to happen when you’re trying to lose weight because when insulin is high, fat burning is blocked.
If you want to accelerate your fat loss, you need to adjust your macros.
In other words, adjust the percentage of carbs, fats, and proteins you are taking in during the day to help your body regain insulin sensitivity.
Accelerate Your Fat Loss with a Low-Carb Macro Ratio
A good place to start is to limit carbs to 25% of your daily diet, which will lessen your body’s dependence on insulin.
For example:
If you are eating about 1,200 calories a day, you would need to keep the number of grams of carbohydrates you are eating below 75 grams per day.
What Do 75 Grams of Carbs look like?
To give you some perspective…
If your goal is to eat no more than 75 grams of carbs per day, eating a banana, two slices of bread, and three Oreo Cookies would put you at your limit.
And, if you’re making choices like that, you will not get much hunger satisfaction, which will cause you to battle cravings during the day.
The Takeaway: It is important to select the right foods when you want to lose weight and control hunger.
The Best Carbs for Fast Weight Loss
When you’re keeping your carbs low, then you need to be relying on non-starchy vegetables for the majority of your carbohydrates.
Non-starchy vegetables, like leafy greens, broccoli, cauliflower, mushrooms, and peppers provide you with a lot of nutrients and a lot of volume, which fills your stomach.
And, to keep hunger fully under control as you accelerate fat loss, I recommend that you keep your healthy fats high.
Balancing Carbs with Fats for Satisfying Weight Loss
A good starting point for fat is to make healthy fats 50 percent of your daily caloric intake.
To achieve this, you need to include healthy fats like nuts, seeds, avocados, and eggs in your daily diet.
The remainder of your calories can come from protein.
This 50-25-25 ratio of fat-protein-carbs is a good starting point for many people.
But, if your metabolism is particularly slow, then you may need to drop your carbs even lower, and replacing those lost carbs with fat grams.
This macro tweak can move you into a ketogenic diet, which is a very-low-carbohydrate diet that pushes your body to rely mainly on ketones for energy.
Ketones are an alternative fuel that your body can burn if its quick energy source (i.e. sugar) is not available.
The neat thing about using ketones as fuel is that ketones are produced by your liver from fatty acids, which are the molecules that make up fat, so when your body is producing ketones, you are burning fat.
To reach this state of ketosis (the state in which your body is efficiently producing ketones), you need to be adjusting your macros more severely than a typical low-carb diet.
For instance, a starting place for a ketogenic diet would be getting more than 70% of your daily calories from fat and less than 10% of your calories per day from carbs.
So, while a ketogenic diet may be effective, and might be what you need if you have a lot of trouble losing weight, it will take a lot of work.
About the Author
Dr. Becky Gillaspy, DC graduated Summa Cum Laude with research honors from Palmer College of Chiropractic in 1991.