Keto Macros Guide

If you’ve heard of or are currently on a Ketogenic diet, chances are that you’ve heard of macros. Macros are perhaps the most important concept to understand when living a Ketogenic lifestyle because the Ketogenic diet completely revolves around your macronutrient intake and the composition of the food you are consuming. Your Ketogenic diet and state of Ketosis depends on your Macro intake as the primary factor in your success. Because of this, you should know how to track and use a calculator to keep close record of your Macro intake for weight loss.

Understanding Macronutrients is not only important from a Ketogenic standpoint, it’s also a very important concept to understand for general health. Any nutritionist will tell you that Macronutrient consumption is vital to living a healthy life and correct body function. Consuming less than the amount that your body needs can lead to a variety of health problems that are both dangerous and unpleasant. That’s why in Keto or in general, understanding Macros and how to properly consume them is a skill that could quite literally save your life and set you on a track for far-reaching self-improvement and health.

How Keto Works

If you haven’t heard of Ketogenic dieting or Ketosis, it’s actually a pretty simple concept. The goal of the Keto diet is to change the way that your body is converting the food you consume into energy. By eating a lot of fat and not many carbs, you can force your body into ketosis, which is a state in which your body burns fat instead of carbs for the energy that it needs to function. This can result in efficient weight loss. Since you need to know what you are consuming, having a good understanding of Macros and how they work can be integral to your success or failure on the Ketogenic diet. You should also know how to use a Macro calculator to track your intake. If you don’t have a good understanding of nutrient intake, nutrient content in your food, or tracking your nutrients, you’re going to have some trouble understanding the Ketogenic diet and how to succeed on it.

At first, macros can be a daunting subject, especially if you’ve never had experience recording macro intake or keeping track of your food at all. You may find yourself with a thousand questions like: What are macronutrients? What macronutrients should I be tracking? Is macro tracking important on the Ketogenic diet? What are the best macros to consume for weight loss? What is the ideal percentage of carbs, protein, and fat? Understanding the answers to these questions and the reasoning behind them is important for anyone pursuing a healthier lifestyle through Keto. If you don’t understand these concepts properly, you may not be maximizing the benefits of Keto or reaching ketosis at all.

We understand that all this information can be quite overwhelming, so we’re going to take it one subject at a time and address each of these questions and more in our complete guide to Keto macros.

What are Macronutrients in the Keto Diet?

Before we understand how macros fit into the Keto diet, we must first understand what exactly “macros” are. The term “macros” is short for macronutrients, which are nutrients that are vital to the body. Since they are so important, your body needs a sustained intake of these nutrients to maintain various processes in the body. This can include anything from healthy hair growth to the promotion of muscle development. The following are considered macronutrients: carbohydrates, water, fiber, fat, and proteins.

Though there are five macronutrients, only some of them are relevant to the Ketogenic diet and the process of ketosis. It is important that you know all of your Macronutrients for your general health, but when we’re talking about the Ketogenic diet, we’re mainly talking about three specific Macronutrients that we need to track in order to maintain our state of fat-burning ketosis.

More About Macro and Micro Nutrients

We’re going to be focusing on carbohydrates, proteins, and fats. Those three macros are considered to be very important specifically to the Ketogenic diet and the process of Ketosis. The reason for this is that they provide energy that is measured in calories. All Macros are important for your overall health, and you should have a balanced intake of them throughout your day. If you have an unbalanced Macro intake (especially in carbs), you are at increased risk for obesity, heart disease, and diabetes. That’s how important balanced macro consumption is to your everyday diet and overall long-term health. Your life and general health depend on you keeping track of the nutrients that you put in to your body. If you have trouble with doing this, you may find it easier to use a calculator.

Though we are focusing on three specific Macronutrients for our discussion centered around the Ketogenic diet and its fat-burning potential, it wouldn’t hurt at all to keep tabs on all nutrients that enter your body.

A common source of confusion is the difference between Micronutrients and Macronutrients. To clear that up simply, Micronutrients are different from Macronutrients in that there are more of them and you need to consume less of each than with Macros. They are still incredibly important to your body, but they don’t carry as much weight in your diet. If you are on a balanced Ketogenic diet, you’ll likely be meeting your daily recommendations for Micros as well as Macros.

Are Macros Important on Keto?

Macros are incredibly important and should be tracked closely.

Carbohydrates

The most notorious of these Macros would have to be carbohydrates, or carbs. Carbohydrates are known to be an excellent source of energy for your body and that fact is often utilized by athletes. They are such a good source of energy for the body because they are easy to break down and convert into usable energy. However, carbohydrates are not essential to your body or its processes. Though they are undeniably good fuel, they can actually be destructive to your body if you don’t get enough exercise. Instead of burning fats in your everyday activities, your body will choose what is easy to break down and readily available: any carbs that you consume. This can lead to obesity and other diseases.

There are diets out there that center around cutting our carbs completely from your diet so that your body instead must burn fats. This has been successful for some, but often proves to be unsustainable as dieters turn back to carb consumption eventually without a proper exercise plan in place. Carbohydrate overconsumption is a very common problem, especially in the United States because our diet contains so many carbs. It is natural for us to be always consuming carbs without a second thought.

Carbs are thought to be one of the main reasons for our obesity problem and a slew of other health problems that are related to the overconsumption of the Macro. A Ketogenic diet aims to balance this intake so that your body utilizes other sources of energy and hopefully results in fat burning.

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Proteins

The second Macro on our list is protein. Unlike carbohydrates, protein is very essential to the body. Your body needs protein most notably to build or repair tissue when needed. Proteins are fairly large in size compared to other Macros and consist of mostly amino acids.

Amino acids are also important to the body and some are absolutely essential to the body. Monitoring your protein intake on Keto is vital. Protein levels are somewhat temperamental and difficult to track, however, because the amount of protein you need will change based on your activity level. As you become more active, your body will need more protein. On the other side of this fine line, too much protein will prevent you from entering ketosis. Finding a good balance here is important to achieving and maintaining ketosis. An easy way to do this is to use a Macro intake calculator.

What is less controversial about protein is its undeniable benefits to muscle growth and weight loss. Eating more protein can help you feel more full and for longer because of its long digestion time, which deters you from eating as much. It also burns calories while you digest proteins and promotes muscle growth. Protein is a fickle, but massively valuable Macronutrient.

Fats

Fats are a complicated, highly-publicized macronutrient that had nutritionists everywhere debating for a good while. Mainly, the debate was over whether foods with high fat content should be consumed. In the end, it’s been concluded that fats are essential for your body to function. Without fat, your body will shut down.

Some of the benefits that we enjoy on behalf of fats are: energy, body temperature regulation, healthy skin and hair, cell health, protection for internal organs, and hormone production. Not only is fat important to the body in general, but it’s also a key part of the Ketogenic diet. Now, on to the complexity of fats. There are several different types of fats. Some are good and an equal amount of them are bad. Navigating this minefield of Macronutrients can be tricky.

Generally, trans fats are fats that you should strive to eliminate completely from your diet. They are bad from you and typically come from highly processed foods and fried foods like what you would find in a fast food restaurant. These will contribute or lead to obesity and associated diseases.

The good fats that are encouraged for consumption are monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats that are naturally occurring. Healthy fats are a great source for essential and non-essential fatty acids, which have numerous health benefits. You can get these fatty acids most efficiently from fish, seafood, nuts, seeds, and plant oils. It’s best practice to consume a variety of these foods to diversify your fatty acids intake.

Each of these Macronutrients serves a very important purpose in your body and two of them are essential for your survival. So, not only are Macros important on Keto, they are important in general for your overall health.

What are good Macros for losing weight?

This is a really common question that unfortunately doesn’t have a simple answer. Everyone wants to know what the magic Macro is for weight loss. While a Ketogenic diet does promote weight loss, there isn’t really a special ingredient that makes it effective. It’s more the combination of factors that makes Ketogenic diets successful more often than not. You’ll also notice that a poorly executed or neglected Keto diet won’t actually do much for you other than cause frustration. An easy step that you can use to improve your tracking accuracy for weight loss is to use a calculator.

The obesity epidemic has a lot of people wondering what shortcuts there are to take when it comes to weight loss—when in reality there are no shortcuts to a healthy, Ketogenic lifestyle. For Keto to work, you must achieve ketosis. And for your body to enter a state of ketosis, you must consume the right foods.

Keto has never been about consuming some magical ingredient that makes you lose weight. It’s always been about changing the way your body converts food into energy. The way that Keto achieves this is to monitor your Macro intake to ensure that the way you are consuming food will lead to fat-burning ketosis. So, the secret to making Keto work isn’t consuming one Macro a lot or a little, it’s finding balance in your Macro consumption that is healthy for your body and promotes weight loss.

That being said, there are Macros that are more important for Keto than others. As we touched on before, the most important Macros to track on Keto are carbohydrates, proteins, and fats. The balance of these Macronutrients are what puts our body into ketosis, the fat burning stage that our body enters during which it burns more fat than usual.

What is the ideal percentage of carbs, protein and fat?

Though balance among your consumption of Macros is very important, each of the Macros that are important to a Ketogenic diet shouldn’t be consumed with equal volume. These nutrients should be consumed proportionally to the recommended ratio of Macronutrient consumption. Now, we’re going to walk you through Macro consumption and the recommended portions of each Macro that you should be consuming on a regular basis under the Ketogenic diet plan. As you go through these tracking methods, you may want to use a Keto calculator to help you do calculations.

Keto Macro Ratio Calculator

On your Ketogenic diet, your ratio should consist of 60-75% calories from fats, 5-10% calories from carbohydrates, and 15-30% calories from your protein. As you can see, there is a sliding range on each of these. As long as your caloric intake is within that range for each of your Macros, you are consuming a healthy, balanced ratio of Macronutrients. You may notice that these ranges are different than the recommended amounts for a regular adult human as stated by various medical publications. That’s because this is the recommended ratio for people on the Ketogenic diet.

The goal of Keto is to change how your body consumes and uses the nutrients that it takes in. This is done through ketosis. Ketosis is a state that your body reaches when you are consuming the right combination of nutrients and it is known to help you lose weight. This is the entire basis for the Ketogenic diet, so it’s important to understand this differentiation between recommended intake for a regular person vs. recommended intake ratio for someone on Keto.

This ratio is fairly easy for someone to understand but can be difficult to calculate and track if you aren’t experienced with recording food intake or familiar with all the items on a nutritional facts label. Calculating your Macro intake is straightforward, but somewhat time-consuming.

Calculating Macro Intake

First, you’ll want to figure out your net carbohydrates. Net carbs can be found by taking the total amount of carbs you took in and subtracting the amount of fiber that you consumed. The resulting number is your net carbohydrates. The reason that you have to do this calculation is that your body can only make glucose from the net carbs that you take in. Fiber won’t have an effect on your blood glucose levels, so you don’t really need to monitor your fiber intake that much unless you are explicitly trying to increase or decrease the amount of fiber that you consume.

To find nutritional information on your food, you can look at the label on the box or container that it came in or use an app to find the info for that item. A common choice for nutrient tracking is MyFitnessPal. In that app, you can look up the food items that you eat, and it will present the nutritional information to you and from there you can either track it within the app or simply write it down.

For most people, the daily intake amount of net carbohydrates shouldn’t be more than 30 grams. Though each person’s recommended intake will vary with their activity level and some other factors, this seems to be the limit at which an excess of carbohydrates will prevent you from entering or kick you out of ketosis.

As we know, ketosis is the entire goal behind the Ketogenic diet so by being kicked out of ketosis by an overconsumption of carbohydrates, you are losing ground and not making any process at all in your Ketogenic diet. For most people, the optimal amount of carbs to take in each day hovers around 20 grams. This allows you enough energy to draw on while still keeping you below that 30-gram hard limit on carbs.

As mentioned earlier, this can change depending on your activity level. In some circumstances, athletes will have to eat more carbs to compensate for the energy they expend. If they don’t, they may not have enough energy for their workouts or for the rest of the day afterwards. Once you start tracking what you eat, your body becomes a finely tuned machine and even a slight variation in your diet can change your performance. This is especially true for athletes so it’s more important than ever to track your Macros closely if you are an athlete or very active individual.

Proteins are a little more complicated. As with carbohydrates, the amount of protein that is suitable for you to consume will vary based on your goals for the diet. The variants that you’ll have to take into account are whether you’re looking to build muscle or lose weight, and your personal body fat percentage. The standard is that you’ll need 1.5 to 2.5 grams of protein for each kilogram of muscle if you want to maintain your current muscle mass or increase it. If you aren’t actively trying to gain muscle, you’ll need less.

To calculate your body fat, take your weight multiplied by your body fat percentage. To find your body fat percentage you can use a scale that has a BMI indicator and can read your body fat percentage. Using this and a few other calculations, you can figure out your muscle mass which will tell you how much protein you should be eating each day. If you are more active and want to build more muscle, you can obviously increase it as you see fit.

The last of the Macros that you’ll need to calculate for are fats. Determining how much fat you should consume in your every day will depend on your goals. Mainly, it will depend on whether you want to start losing weight or if you want to simply maintain your current weight. If you want to maintain your weight, you need to eat more fats than if you were trying to lose weight.

To begin your calculations, you can use an online keto calculator to determine how many grams of fats you are allowed to consume each day. This is going to depend on your activity level, goals, and things like your height and weight. Once you have the number of grams of fats that you can consume, you can pretty easily figure out the amount of calories from fat that you should be including in your diet. Protein and carbohydrates contain about 4 calories per gram while fat contains about 9 calories per gram. So, if your calculations show that you need to eat 200 grams of fat, that means that 1800 of your daily caloric intakes should come from fats since each gram of fat has 9 calories in it.

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Calories and Calorie Deficits

A typical woman needs to eat around 2,000 calories a day while a man should be eating around 2,500 calories per day. These are recommended amounts and can be adjusted with different activity levels and eating habits, but on average these figures are accurate.

If you eat 500 more calories than your recommended limit each day, you will be in maintenance mode for muscle mass or total weight. If you eat less, it’ll help you lose weight and body fat. Though these guidelines are true, it should be noted that the Ketogenic diet doesn’t really involve counting calories. So, while you should be aware of these basic principles of caloric intake, your Ketogenic success or failure won’t necessarily hinge on your daily calorie consumption. Overeating doesn’t tend to be as much of a problem for Ketogenic dieters since the diet by nature suppresses appetite due to the high amount of fat consumed on the diet.

In summary, adhering to the ideal ratio of Macronutrient intake is important to maintain a state of ketosis, and the amount of each Macro that you should consume will vary with your body type, personal goals, and activity level. You should constantly be tracking these variables and be adjusting your diet to suit them.

Calculating Food Macros

Now that you know how to calculate your daily Macronutrient needs, we’re ready to move on to calculating the number of Macros in the food that you are consuming. This is an equally important skill. Knowing what you need for intake is useless if you can’t determine whether you have reached the daily requirement for that Macro. Knowing how to accurately calculate your Macro intake will ensure that you can successfully enter and maintain a state of ketosis, which is the ultimate goal of a Ketogenic diet.

It’s not enough to know what foods are typically high in fat or low in carbs. To achieve maximum results on the Keto diet, you should be able to calculate almost exactly how much of each Macro you take in with each meal. Luckily, this process is pretty easy. It does, however, take a considerable amount of time and dedication to the diet. It’s easy to fall behind and lose track of what you’ve eaten, which is why we recommend that you record your stats immediately after each meal. If you don’t, you might forget what you ate, and your Macros will be inaccurate, which could ultimately cause you to fail to enter ketosis or knock you out of ketosis.

There are several, perhaps hundreds, of resources out there that have detailed nutritional facts on common foods. The most popular of these resources seems to be MyFitnessPal. Not only does MFP have an extensive database of food items and the corresponding nutrition facts, it is also a great tool for tracking Macro intake. This unique combination makes MFP one of the most popular apps for Ketogenic dieters. All you have to do is search for the food that you ate and then select it when it shows up. From there you can either look at the nutrition facts and record them on your own or you can add them to your daily food diary and MFP will add up these nutrition facts for you. If you don’t have a fancy app to do it for you, no worries! This is an easy process and just requires some quick addition.

What you want to do to begin is write down all the food items that you ate that day and examine their nutritional content. Write down the following numbers for each: grams of fat, grams of net carbs, and grams of protein. To determine your daily intake for each of these, simply add them up individually to come to a final number. It may be helpful to keep a running total throughout the day so that you know what foods you can eat and what you can’t. If you don’t keep track actively, you may find it easy to go over your threshold or not have enough of one of the Macros. This is a silly reason to miss out on ketosis, so you should be diligent in your tracking and really commit to keeping close records of what you eat each day and what the Macro content is of those foods.

If you are having trouble meeting your Macro intake, we have compiled some tips and tricks to help you out! Firstly, you’re going to want to remember to stay away from highly processed foods. These items often contain ingredients that are detrimental to your dieting and many times you don’t know exactly what you’re putting in to your body. This is concerning in more ways than one, and not just from a Ketogenic standpoint.

Another great tip is to plan your meals. Planning meals is essential when trying to live a healthy Ketogenic lifestyle, especially because of all the nutritional needs that you need to meet and how precise you need to be when consuming your food. Eating food that isn’t in your daily plan is a recipe for disaster, since you don’t have time to properly assess each food item and make sure that it fits into your planned allotment of Macros for the day. Unfortunately, this essentially eliminates all dining-out options and especially rules out fast food options.

Lastly, it’s always a good idea to join a Keto community to get support, advice, and other vital information from people that are in the same boat as you. Dieting can be difficult, and even more difficult if you don’t have someone to talk to, bounce ideas off, and ask questions to. Joining a Keto community helps with this and acts as a support group that can help cheerlead your Ketogenic efforts. Not only will a Keto community help you reach your goals, but it will also feel much sweeter when you accomplish them, and you can turn right back around and help others that are in the early stages of Keto and still need guidance.

Summary

In this article, we covered dozens of topics but the most important questions that we answered were:

- What are Macronutrients in the Keto Diet?
- Are Macros Important on Keto?
- What are good macros for losing weight?
- What is the ideal percentage of carbs, protein, and fat?

Though these were the central topics of conversation, you should have been able to absorb many other useful bits of information along the way. The Ketogenic diet stresses the idea of knowing exactly what is going into your body at all times, so there’s never a shortage of information when it comes to this diet. You should always be thorough, dedicated, and precise when prepping for and consuming Ketogenic meals. Now that you have everything you need, you can start including the right Macros in your diet!