This is a no fluff podcast created for busy women. We are Baylee and Brianna. We are dedicated to helping women breakup with dieting and rethink the way you look at food. Sharing the real “secret” to fat loss - learning how your body actually works! Our goal is to give YOU the tools that you need to navigate BS diet culture and empower you to feel confident with your food choices so that you can sustainably reach your goals. Find us at @BayleeTheDietitian and @themomminnutritionist! Welcome to Mocktail Minutes!
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
0:00
|
12:16
This week Baylee is chatting about the importance of consistent intakes. She breaks down why your daily calorie and macro targets are important to pay attention to even if your weekly averages look okay.
Hello everyone. Welcome back to this week's episode of Mocktail Minutes. This is Bailey, and I'm doing a solo episode today. I am drinking the Just Ingredients Peach Electrolytes. They've been my favorite lately And today we are gonna talk about consistency with your macros. So this is super important. Whether you're tracking your macros or not, really consistent intake is going to be important for you What consistency does is it creates more of a controlled environment for you. We don't need macros to be identical every day, but when swings are huge, it becomes much harder to understand what the body is actually responding to. So number one, consistency creates more predictable energy and hunger. Carbohydrates and fats aren't interchangeable just because they both provide calories. I mean, carbs provide four calories per gram, and they are like your primary fuel source, and they also replenish your liver and muscle glycogen. Fat provides nine calories per gram. They are needed for your cell membranes and your hormones, and overall they're very energy-dense. So if someone goes from like hundred and ten to two hundred and thirty-nine carbs, like in two different days, that's like a hundred and twenty-nine difference, so five hundred and sixteen calorie difference. If like your fat went from sixty-eight to one twenty-five, that's a fifty-seven gram difference, but still over a five hundred calorie difference. So potentially you're talking, like even if those two things are combined, that's a thousand calorie difference depending on how those macros overlap. The body does have mechanisms that compensate for variations in intake, but they're not perfect or necessarily immediate. Research in healthy women has found corrective responses to deviations in energy and macro intake occurring over roughly like three to six days rather than perfectly balancing things the next day. And that can create a pattern of under eat, get hungry, eat more, feel like you overate, restrict again. I'd honestly rather you sta- establish enough consistency that hunger and fullness become more predictable instead of constantly feeling like you're reacting to yesterday's intake. Consistency is also going to make the scale much easier to interpret. So when your carbs increase, glycogen storage generally increases, and glycogen storage is associated with increased body water. So reviews suggest that changes in your muscle glycogen can be accompanied by substantial changes in body water. It's estimated that three to four grams of water are held per gram of glycogen. Now, the exact relationship kind of varies, and not all that water can be considered directly just, like, bound to glycogen. But if you're ranging between a hundred and ten and two hundred and twenty-five calories throughout the week, now glycogen, water, food volume, maybe sodium, are changing considerably all throughout the week. A one to three-pound increase after a higher carb day does not automatically mean fat gain. But physiologically, what we see is, "I gained two pounds," so we cut carbs, we blame it on the carbs, which not exactly how it works. In reality, we may be largely just watching glycogen and fluid shifts, not changes in body fat. So consistent macros give us a cleaner amount of data from the scale. The third thing, consistency supports training, recovery, and muscle preservation, and this is especially important during a fat loss phase because the goal isn't simply just make the scale less. It's to hopefully lose fat while preserving as much lean tissue as possible. So that carb availability influences that muscle glycogen, and muscle glycogen is an important fuel source during exercise. High-volume training is going to deplete glycogen more substantially while adequate carb intake is gonna support the restoration of your glycogen. I would say protein consistency also matters here for exercising adults, active adults. Evidence supports that meeting your total daily protein needs and distributing protein throughout the day can support more of that muscle protein synthesis because we wanna be getting at least thirty grams of protein at every meal, about every three to four hours. This is why I care more about are we consistently giving our body what it needs to maintain muscle than randomly having a day where we got a hundred and eighty grams of protein to kinda compensate for a low protein day Consistency is gonna give you much better data. This is probably the biggest reason as a dietician, because imagine if you were to tell me, "I've eaten 1,900 calories for four weeks and haven't lost a weight." Great. Now I can see is 1,900 appropriate. But if your week actually looks like a variation between 1,400 to 2,500, the average may look reasonable, but it's a very different eating pattern when intake is all over the place. That day-to-day variation in energy and nutrient intake is, I mean, it can be due to eating behaviors, and sh- studies show that energy intake naturally varies considerably with individuals. Sa- some variation is normal, but when I'm deliberately trying to, like, manipulate nutrition for fat loss or your maintenance or your reverse phase, reducing extreme variability gives me kinda like a much cleaner palette to work with. If weight isn't changing, but you do have consistent calories, protein, carb, fat, steps, training, then I have much more confidence making an adjustment. Otherwise, we're changing six variables and trying to figure out which one actually mattered. So we want consistency so we can know what to actually change, what's working and what's not working. Consistency will also help you break from the restrict compensate cycle. One thing I'd be careful about is seeing how that, like, macro variability affects your eating. It doesn't necessarily make everyone overeat. Humans, like I said, we have the ability to compensate for higher and lower days, but compensation isn't perfect, and so we wanna investigate, like, what's actually happening. Are you intentionally restricting? Are you skipping breakfast? Are you too busy? Are you saving calories? Are you not hungry? Are you trying to be good, so that way you can have more room on the weekends? It's not necessarily a willpower, we simply just... Like, a willpower issue, we simply just need to create a more structured fueling pattern. So you also, with that being said, like if you do have a lower or a higher day, you don't have to compensate the next day. Just keep going, maintain your goals, 'cause we're trying to create consistency. Which consistency doesn't mean you're hitting your macros perfectly. This is important because I don't want you thinking like, "Bailey said I have to hit my macros to be consistent, so if my goals are 220 and I ate 217, I ruined it all." No. Your body's not gonna know the difference between, like, three grams of carbs. Like, that's not a substantial difference. We're looking for reasonable consistency, not perfectionism. So I have, like, a 10-gram wiggle room for carbs and protein, and I say, like, within five grams of your goal for fat. So There's not like really a scientific rule for this. That's just what I have found to work really well. So if your goal is sixty-five grams of fat, then you wanna be between sixty and seventy-five grams above or below. So your body can handle different amounts of food from day to day. Macro consistency provides us with better data. It allows things to be more predictable. You have more predictable feelings, so predictable hunger. Your training, it becomes more consistent. You have less fluctuations in the scale. You can make adjustments easier, especially during a reverse diet or a maintenance or like a strategic fat loss. I want to know what happens when we give your body roughly the same nutritional input consistent- consistency because before we decide this doesn't work or my body isn't responding, we need to make sure we're actually giving it something consistent to be responsive to. Your body likes... It doesn't like a lot of change. I mean, think about it. Anytime we try and change anything, it-- we like put up red flags naturally in our brain. Our body likes things to be the same. You do not need to change your intake every day to kinda keep your body guessing. That, I would say, is not a great strategy for weight loss. What you wanna do is have consistent intake, and then we adjust from there. We don't want macros all over the place. We don't want training to be all over the place. We don't want steps to be all over the place because then it's really hard to see, like, what is your body actually enjoying? How is it responding? Is it responding like you should? Because if, let's say, you meet your macros two weeks in a row, one week you did three workouts, and you got ten thousand steps. The next week you did two workouts and got five thousand steps. That's a different energy availability and energy usage. So with that lack of consistency, and if you didn't-- if the scale didn't move, it's not because those macros didn't work. It's because, okay, did that lack of movement, that change in movement affect you? Yes, probably. We want a consistence- consistent inputs, outputs across the board, and that's really what's gonna help us see what's working, what's not, so that way we can make adjustments based on are you building muscle, are you trying to lose fat, or are you trying to maintain? We don't want it to have so many variables changing all the time because then we don't really know. So the key here is consistency, not perfection, and having that consistent intake is truly so important, and this could be why you're feeling stuck, where it's like maybe your average is there, but look a little bit deeper. How is your protein, carbs, fat, fiber consistently throughout the week? How are your steps? How is your training? How's your water intake? How are your bowel movements? We're looking for similar things, so that way if we see, okay, you know what? We are getting... Hitting our macros throughout the week, our training is pretty good, and we're not losing weight, maybe we do need to drop a little bit. Maybe we need to do less carbs, bring the fat up a little bit. There's a couple different things you can adjust there, but you have to give yourself a good foundation and a good consistency no matter what phase you're in to see what is actually working for you and your body
