Macros Made Simple: Finally Lose The Gut After 40 - 128

Coach Brian: Recently, I asked a guy what macros are, and he couldn't answer. That's what most guys over 40 are like. They just don't understand nutrition to a deeper level. They certainly will lift. They'll do cardio. They'll "diet," in quotations, but they still don't understand how to build a balanced meal and understand the difference between the type of carbs they should be eating or maybe should be staying away from.

I sat down with Aesha Tahir on her 9 to 5 Wellness podcast to fix that. We broke down what macros are in plain, simple, easy to understand conversation, what each does, how to build your plate in a balanced manner that's going to burn belly fat, and how to eat around your workouts as well.

This conversation was so good and it gave real answers, I thought I'd just bring it over here. So, I want to introduce you to Aesha and our wonderful conversation on macros for episode 128 of Driven For Health. This is Coach Brian Parana. Here we go.

Aesha Tahir: Hello everyone. How are you guys? And today I have a guest who is going to help us understand macros.

So macronutrients is something that is a foundational aspect of nutrition and a lot of people aren't sure what is the right way to go about them. Should we just give up on carbs? Should we just eat fat? Should we just give up on fat altogether? Like, what is going on over there? I get so many DMs.

And I was like, you know what? I need some help in this department myself. So, I have Coach Brian Parana with me today, and he's going to be able to break it down into very simple steps for us and help us understand what macros are, because I know that a lot of us, including me sometimes, are tired of restrictive fad diets which can end up leaving you burned out, they're not sustainable, right? So I was like okay, it is time to learn about macronutrients and how balancing them can actually help us not only rev up our metabolism and fuel our workouts, but also not get bored of the same old same old every day. So, welcome to the pod, Brian.

Coach Brian: Thank you. You mean macros aren't just some buzzword that's getting thrown around these days? They're actually foundational to nutrition and eating real food.

Aesha Tahir: Yeah. Yeah. Right. We all think that, and I don't blame our listeners and viewers, because there's so much confusion out there, especially when it comes to nutrition. We are all kind of confused because one day we are talking about ditch the carbs, the other day it's ditch the fats, and then the third it's like just eat protein, and we all know there is a balance. So let's talk about it. What are macros? What are we talking about? Someone who has heard the term everywhere on TikTok and other social media platforms, but they're like, I have no idea what macros are.

Coach Brian: Macros aren't related to math, or macro photography, they're related to nutrition. Macro is shorthand for macronutrients, because that's a really long word to write out all the time. So we shortened it to macros, and that simply is protein, carbs, fats. Those are the three things that primarily make up the food that we eat and the calories that are in the food that we eat. So that's it. Just protein, carbs, fats.

Aesha Tahir: Yes, protein, carbs, and fat. Okay. And I think of macros as the three main building blocks of our food, because they're all serving a different purpose. So let's go a little bit deeper. I want to know, why is protein important? Why are carbs important? Why fat?

Coach Brian: So real quick, helping you understand what each of these does. Protein helps build and recover your body, or muscles. And protein has a lot of different functions in the body, especially at a cellular level, probably millions of things that need to go on in the body, but we can think about muscles themselves. The second one is carbs. That's for energy. We need energy. Just like a car needs gasoline to drive, our body runs off carbohydrates, and they get stored in your muscle. The energy can also get stored as body fat. And then lastly, we have the fat macro. Fat is generally easy to understand for hormonal health, vitamin D, A, B, all these type of things to help our body function properly. And that's the easiest way to think of those three.

Aesha Tahir: Love all those components, the protein, carbs, and fat. And I also want to highlight and add to the fats a little bit, because we don't realize it often, but fats are also the long-lasting energy reserves. Your brain functions on fat. Like 70% of the fat in your body is used by your brain as fuel. And for distance runners, like ultramarathoners, they're primarily relying on fat metabolism and fat as fuel.

Coach Brian: Yeah, definitely in the long distance stuff. And so I just wanted to add to that, carbs are the immediate source of fuel, and then fats are the longer-lasting fuel. So then let's get back to, say, modern society. We have food everywhere, always, right? We referenced last time, you could go buy 100,000 calories within 5 miles of your house, and it'd be relatively cheap. Whereas back 10,000 years ago, you needed some body fat to live and to be able to sustain energy and life, because it was really hard to come by 100,000 calories.

Aesha Tahir: Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. Going back to the caveman days, of course, that's what our hunter-gatherer ancestors were relying on. Okay, I'm so glad you brought in calories. What is the difference between calories and macros? Because when people are trying to track, everybody's confused here. Like, well, I thought I was supposed to track my calories and not macros. Like what do I do now? What's the difference?

Coach Brian: Well, no matter what, I always tell people they have to have some level of calorie awareness. Calories are how humans should define what is the energy in the food that you're eating. Simply put, it could be called kilocalories or kilojoules, we don't need to get into that science, it's just calories. So this apple holds 100 calories in it. Well, then the next layer down is macronutrients. And an apple has carbs. It doesn't really have fat or protein. So in a sense, an apple is generally just 25 grams of carbohydrates if it's 100 calories, because, let's break down simple math, and this is how you understand where calories and macros connect, four calories per one gram of protein, four calories per one gram of carb, and nine calories per one gram of fat. That is calorie and macro 101. So if you understand those three conversions, you can read a nutrition label and have a full understanding of what's actually in the food, not the percentages based off of a 2,000 calorie diet or any of that. You can just literally look and see an apple has 25 carbs in it at 100 calories. And for a typical size apple, that's a carb. And then you can determine where that fits into your day based on your calorie needs, based on how many carbs you have allotted for the day, or maybe it's a good snack because it's a mother nature single-serving snack pack, self-contained. It's great.

Aesha Tahir: If you eat an apple with the skin on, it has a lot of fiber. So fiber is always a good complex carbohydrate to have, and it's healthy, it's a prebiotic for your gut too. I love how you just differentiated it, because I feel like sometimes even I have a hard time. But lately I've started explaining this to my clients that calories focus on quantity of energy. So if you think about a budget, we all budget our finances, right? So it's the overall budget, calories. But then tracking macros is the quality of energy, the budget categories. Are you putting it towards retirement, which would probably be protein, because building muscle mass, or you're putting it towards immediate expenses, which are fat and carbohydrates mostly. So that's great.

Coach Brian: Real quick on this, I want to expand on it because you just gave me a layup. Everyone understands the currency of money, the dollars and cents. We understand the basics of how to spend it, how to save it, we all love spending it more than saving it. But we understand that, and we don't need to get into the economics or finances of it. But we all understand basic concepts of spending and saving money. Food is just the same, the currency of food is calories, protein, carbs, and fats. Once you understand what is in the food you're eating, how much of a calorie budget you're allowed in a day, and where to divvy it up between the protein, the carbs, and the fats, you become food, calorie, macro literate, and you understand how to control food just by looking at it. Tracking calories and macros, whenever I do it with anyone, is a transferable skill for long-term understanding of how to maintain your body weight, just like making sure you have money for retirement. We want to make sure we're saving enough and making wise investments, at the very least the S&P, and then we can accumulate wealth over time. For our body, wealth is health. We want to make sure we're not trying to save calories on our waistline, because that does not equal poor health. We have no shortage of food, because it's everywhere and always around us. So we have to have a heightened awareness around what food we pick, the people we're around, the environments we're in, the social peer pressure, your strengths and weaknesses around food. Those are just a few things off the top of my head to consider, because food is fun, it's happy, it's sadness, it's anger, it's joy, it covers this whole range of emotion that humans have, and we have to control it on some level so that you don't gain weight tomorrow and then have to work harder to get what you ate today off your body.

Aesha Tahir: I love the analogy here to currency and spending, because I think you're right. Most of us, just to live and take care of ourselves and our families, we have to be aware of how we spend money, or budgeting and the balance system. So the same rules kind of apply to nutrition too, and what we eat. I do want to build on this because I think it's such a great analogy. What is the balanced ratio of these three nutrients that's going to be very beneficial for long-term health? Is there something specific that you share with your clients?

Coach Brian: Definitely, if you are tracking macros, a really good starting place is 40/30/30: 40% carbs, 30% protein, 30% fat. That gives you a very balanced meal across the day, at three or four meals in a day, and you can thoroughly enjoy your food choices in the right portions. Now certainly we can manipulate them a little bit up or down. A little bit more carbs if you move a lot or you're very active. A little less carbs if you have a more sedentary lifestyle. A little bit more protein if you really enjoy protein, work out a lot, or move your body a lot, and maybe a little less if you just don't enjoy protein. Not everyone enjoys eating a 10 oz steak or a big chicken breast every day. Same thing with fat. So we can play with these within 5 to maybe 10% of those starting numbers. And whenever I'm working with someone, my goal is to create awareness around calories first, help them start to understand what, in quotations, the macros are, whether we're tracking food or not. They still have to understand to a certain degree what is in the food they eat on a normal regular basis, so they can identify what that food is and how it needs to be combined with other food to create a balanced meal, some protein, some starch, and a lot of vegetables, or a piece of fruit, as an example of building an ideal plate.

Aesha Tahir: Love this explanation, so true. And I work off of the same breakdown as well. And then of course, depending on, like someone who's a bodybuilder, they're going to need a little more protein, a little more fat, a little less carbs. Someone who's a distance runner, we switch it around where they need a little more carbs. There's a range, and no human is alike.

Coach Brian: And even in your lifetime, you might have different needs for different seasons of life as well. And it's okay, not every day is going to be, in quotations, perfect. If you have a low protein day, that doesn't mean you failed, or you had a high sugar day because there was sweets, treats, and fun at Halloween. We again have to have what I call MBF, moderation, balance, flexibility, built in. The mean, the overall average over time, not just the time that you're awake. People say, oh, I have a fasting window, okay, that's great that you only eat in a four or eight hour time frame, but there are scientific studies that show eating in a 12 hour time frame will still produce the same results. So why are you starving all day just to then wait to eat? And you worked out at 6am and you're going to have your first meal at 1? Sport nutrition 101 says you should fuel your workout. So why are we not eating right after a workout to replenish the body? Once you get educated and understand calorie awareness and a better understanding of how it fits into your day-to-day life, because I was always hangry coming into lunch, and people were trying to avoid me at lunchtime meetings because they knew I needed food and didn't want to tell me.

Aesha Tahir: You are speaking to the choir over here. And I think what you said, I want to summarize it real quick about the nutrition around workouts. I really think we should have another Instagram Live on nutrition timing around workouts, because that's my biggest pet peeve with everyone I've worked with. There's a place and time for fasted workouts, for some people it works, but there's a lot of research that shows it doesn't work for a lot of people. For women especially, it doesn't work for many different reasons, because we have high cortisol levels. And on top of it, when people don't eat within that 30 minute to 60 minute window after a workout, now you're breaking down more muscle. You just broke down muscle in the gym, or on the road, whatever mode of exercise you had, and now you're breaking down more muscle, because your muscles are looking for protein and carbs, we have this mechanism inside our bodies after a workout called muscle protein synthesis, that is active at that time and looking for amino acids to build those muscle fibers back up. And if you're not eating, you don't realize you're breaking down more bone and muscle just to get those nutrients.

Coach Brian: Right. We'll throw an analogy out here. Say we're going to wash the car, we take the sponge, dip it in the water, pull it out, and start washing it. All the water starts to drip out of it. That's the same thing as a workout, your body is the sponge, water is the energy in your body that you're squeezing out through flexing muscles and running. And at the end, we want to put the sponge back in the water, not just let it sit out in the sun to dry up. That's a good analogy for your body, you're making it more stressful on your body if you don't have good food timing, especially after a hard workout. If your workout isn't as hard, say a five out of 10 instead of a seven, eight, nine out of 10, you could probably make it two hours without that being a big deal. But if it's robust and you're lifting heavy, doing things like CrossFit, you should be eating within 30 to 60 minutes and have that as part of your nutritional strategy, so you feel better immediately after the workout, you can get right back up and get going. It's like getting the water back in the sponge, and you're rejuvenated, because sponges need water, they're best used that way, not dry. And then you also forego later challenges with more hunger, cravings, and binging, because you were more planned and put something in your mouth that worked.

Aesha Tahir: Absolutely, I couldn't agree more. Okay, so to wrap it up, I want to leave our listeners with an important tip, because this is one of the questions that keeps coming to me in DMs, people send me on Instagram and LinkedIn. A lot of people are hesitant to go the macro tracking route because they feel like it overwhelms them. They're like, I don't want to constantly count, and I don't want to become obsessive with my tracking, I have a life to live and food is something I enjoy, I don't want to stop enjoying it. So what can someone who feels like this do? How can they track macros in an easy way and feel like they're fueling their body and keeping their metabolism healthy?

Coach Brian: They'll love this question. In my very first call with every client, I give them a choice, a fork in the road. Are we going to focus on the basic components and tenets of eating healthier, better food choices, practicing portion control, having balanced meals, eating three to four times at 3 to 5 hour time frames? That's the basis of good, quality, healthy body weight maintenance and energy that I gave you, I gave you my secret, and she would agree, that's the secret: never eating too many calories and making sure you're full enough until you eat again. So we have that path. The other path is, hey, do you want to track? And then I also ask, have you ever tracked? Have you ever had experience with it? Because I need to understand what they think of tracking as well. Tracking, to me, is a tool in the nutritional toolbox that we can use to help better understand calories, then macros, protein, carbs, and fats, and then proper portions of these foods and how they combine and interact with other foods at a single meal, like breakfast, and then across the day into dinner or 9, 10 o'clock at night. Because if you understand calories, macros, and proper portions of food, you can eat right before you go to bed and be stuffed all day long and still accomplish a calorie deficit to help lose weight and win. Now it also depends on where this person is at, usually, and probably in your case too, someone is coming to me because they're overweight, or they have bad blood panels, or they're unhappy with their energy or how they look and feel, the list goes on. They're worried, in their 40s and 50s now, they're starting to worry, hey, I actually want to have a quality life in 20 years, because that's really close now. And if they don't have the skill sets around how to manage food, and it shows up in their body, whether they're overweight or in a disease-like state, diabetes, cholesterol, blood pressure, then they may need to spend more time learning this, and we just have to do it in the easiest way possible. I always tell people, let's approach it with curiosity, what is in the food that I'm eating, not I have to sit down and type this thing in and weigh it. Yeah, it's going to be work, but you just spent 15 years gaining 20-plus pounds and your A1C is now to the point your doctor's trying to put you on meds for diabetes. So you tell me, we need to slow down to be able to understand how to properly feed and fuel yourself, and tracking is the fastest, easiest way to do it. And we'll do it in a fun way, so you actually learn what is in the food, and you can still have sweets and treats, but we're also going to look for alternatives, and we're going to find how this fits in, say Fourth of July is around the corner, and you want the red, white, and blue popsicle, the rocket pop, okay, cool, that's going to be 150 calories of straight carbs and sugar. How does that fit with the rest of that meal at that time? You can't just go down the buffet and hit the potato salads and the bread rolls and have two hamburgers and hot dogs and all this stuff, it's too much, because those are all high calorie, fatty, high carb foods that will move you in the wrong direction. So that ends up being it. We start at the easiest, it could just be tracking calories the first couple days. It could be, hey, we're just going to track whatever you think is protein, let's plug that in. Or it could be we need to do a deep dive, and you just need to have grace, patience, and start tracking everything you eat, whether it's on the forbidden food list you think there is or not, and we move from there. We acknowledge what you're eating, understand the calorie ramifications and what is the composition of the food, the protein, carbs, and fats, and going back to the ratio. Once we do that, usually it takes, for me, if I'm working with someone, one to two weeks, and it's like they took a college-level nutrition class. Like, oh my gosh, I'm seeing the matrix now, I can understand calories, protein, carbs, fats significantly better. Whereas if they do it by themselves, it could be really challenging or frustrating.

Aesha Tahir: Absolutely, I just love how you broke that down, because it's a tool in a toolbox, which is so important, because a lot of us have been living our lives never learning this. I was just going to say, like the home economics course I took, I was never taught macros. Just, they had you bake a cake, right?

Coach Brian: Yeah, exactly.

Aesha Tahir: I was making pancakes and cakes, I guess.

Coach Brian: Well, that's a different story.

Aesha Tahir: Agreed. I was in home ec too, I remember. So that being said, even when I started my health journey, I started tracking my macros, and just like you said, it takes only two to three weeks and it's eye-opening to understand how simple nutrition can be. Yes, the early phase is a little bit cumbersome, you have to get used to it, it's something new to do, but once you get used to it, you're like, oh my goodness, my life is so simplified. And once you start seeing results, then you're hooked, like this is it.

Coach Brian: And results don't come first, people, the actions that lead to results come first.

Aesha Tahir: Yes, actions lead to results, exactly. Thanks for mentioning that. These were a few questions that just kept coming in my DMs, and I was like, let's break it down, because Coach Brian is so great at talking about nutrition. Thanks for joining us today.

Coach Brian: I'm super happy to help. I explain this to everyone pretty much every day for the last 15 years, and my job is to figure out how I can easily break it down so this person understands it in the fastest, easiest way, so they can take action and get results, because I can't make it complicated. I tried, even in our conversation today, to keep it simple, because simple is easy, gets done. If it goes from third grade reading language to eighth grade reading language, you've lost a lot of people in the different words or sentence structures. So it's simple, easy, what can I get this person to do that moves them toward their health goals? And that's it.

Aesha Tahir: Yes, and it's a really great tool to have, which can move you in the right direction very fast once you get the hang of it. Please reach out to Coach Brian, he's always there to help you guys.

Coach Brian: And one more thing here, for a tool to track, I'm a big fan of starting off with Cronometer. It's free, it has a lot of free features in it. They all do the same thing, but you do not need to pay for a subscription. And also, when you're signing up, it's going to ask you all these questions, and it'll do its best to pair you up, I think with AI now it's a lot better at initially getting you started. But let's not pay too much attention to whatever that tells you to do. How about we spend 3 to 5 days just tracking what you're eating, and sure, make better choices, practice portion control, move in a healthier direction. As soon as you understand that, you start seeing how many calories, because I need that level of awareness to then start creating more motivation.

Aesha Tahir: Absolutely, I love this tool too. I also want to add another tool, I think maybe it's a little old school now, but MyFitnessPal is also very good, and it's free. Same concept, everything is the same, just a tool to use to track.

Coach Brian: Lose It, MacroFactor, there's so many out there now.

Aesha Tahir: Yep, absolutely.

Coach Brian: AI Food Thing, or whatever, I'm sure that's the name of one too.

Aesha Tahir: Yeah, that would be a good name actually. Let's create one, Brian. Thank you so much again for joining us, and thank you everyone.

Coach Brian: I hope you were able to understand how I explained macros. I really tried to go out of my way to make it as simple and easy as possible. I hope you can take this information and actually do something with it, around your health, losing weight, improving your blood panels, all those things, because it can be as simple as: food is just calories, protein, carbs, and fats. You don't have to think of it as being, in quotations, healthy or not, ask 10 people what's healthy and they'll tell you 10 different answers, so that's not even a good way to do it. Let's just look at brass tacks: what's in the food you're eating, how many calories is it, what are the macros to it, and how does that add up not only in the individual meal you ate but across the meals of the day, so you accomplish your goals, which, for most of the people I work with, is a fat loss approach. So being in a calorie deficit and staying full, and not being hangry, nobody wants that, or wants to be around you when you are.

That's it for this episode, and catch you in the next one, which is an awesome example of a client success story. Chandler and I talk about what success looks like when he finally accepted the middle gear mentality and dropped the all-or-nothing. Dude lost 25 pounds in 100 days while having power out at his house for seven days, going to an EDM music festival for four or five days, managing a job change, moving, and taking care of his father through some health issues. This is real life lived, and that's the most important part about what I ever do with anyone, making sure this is a transformative experience that goes beyond just, in quotations, a diet, but actually gives you real, lasting results and success. That's it for this episode of Driven For Health. Also, check out Aesha's 9 to 5 Wellness podcast, links are in the show notes.