Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth - 2842: How to Calculate Your Macros ; The Complete Beginner to Advanced Guide

Episode Date: April 23, 2026

Macros explained, finally in a way that actually makes sense. Sal, Adam, and Justin break down everything you need to know about macronutrients: what they are, why they matter more than just counting calories, how to calculate your targets, and how to adjust them based on your goals and how your body feels. Whether you're trying to lose fat, build muscle, or just finally understand what everyone is talking about when they say 'hit your macros,' this episode covers it all. They also share the wild frontier story about hunters who starved to death eating nothing but rabbits, and why that story changes how you think about fat forever. Free Resource 🔗 Free Macro Calculator — Get your personalized macro targets in seconds: mapsmacro.com Sponsors & Links 🔗 Olipop — Low-calorie, gut-healthy soda (50 cal, 3g sugar per can): drinkolipop.com/mindpump — Get a free can of OLIPOP: Buy any 2 cans of Olipop in store, and we'll pay you back for one! Works on any flavor, any retailer. 🔗 MAPS Push Pull Legs (NEW) — Men & women's versions, at-home dumbbell option. 40% off: mapsppl.com with code PPL 🔗 Mind Pump Merch — Shirts, hats, mugs, training gear: mindpumpstore.com   00:02:25  What Are Macros? The Simple Breakdown 00:03:40  Why Macros Matter More Than Just Calories 00:05:38  The Two Essential Macronutrients (And the One That Isn't) 00:06:23  Rabbit Starvation — The Frontier Story About Eating Too Lean 00:10:40  How to Find Your Optimal Macro Ratio 00:11:01  Protein: What the Research Says vs. What Coaches Actually Recommend 00:13:46  Why Coaches Recommend 1g Per Pound of Target Body Weight 00:14:52  Why You Can't Carry Over Protein — Hit It Every Single Day 00:16:09  Fat: Why Going Too Low Destroys Your Hormones, Libido & Performance 00:18:10  Minimum Fat Targets for Men and Women 00:19:03  Why Focusing Only on Calories Backfires — The Fat Trap 00:20:25  Calories Determine Weight. Macros Determine Body Composition. 00:22:06  Carbohydrates: How to Flex Them Around Your Goals 00:23:08  High Carb vs. Low Carb — Individual Variance Explained 00:24:35  How to Use the Free Macro Calculator (Maps Macro)   Find Us 📲 Instagram: @MindPumpMedia 💻 Programs, coaching & more: MindPumpMedia.com

If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go. Mind Pump, Mind Pump with your hosts. Sal DeStefano, Adam Schaefer, and Justin Andrews. You just found the most downloaded fitness, health, and entertainment podcast. This is Mind Pump. Today's episode, How to Calculate Macros. This is for you, whether you want to build muscle, burn, body fat. What are macros and how do you calculate them?

By the way, we have a calculator online. that gives you a nice general number on what macros you should be consuming. How many grams of proteins, fats, and carbs? You go to Maps Macro.com. It's free. It'll take you 10 seconds. Now, this episode is brought to by Olipop. So, Olipop is, well, it tastes like the soda you grew up drinking as a kid,

except it's super low calorie. An entire can of this cream soda, Oliop, is 50 calories. 50 calories. there's less than, it's a three grams of sugar in the whole can. It tastes great. They have lots of different, lots of different flavors. It helps support gut health because there's fiber in there. And it tastes great.

So instead of drinking 200 calories and a bunch of sugar, you can do olipop. Go to drinkolipop.com forward slash mind pump. That's drink, oh, I, p-op, dot com, forward slash mind pump. You can get a free can of olipop. Buy any two cans of olipop in the store, and they'll pay you back for one.

This works with any flavor, any retailer. We also have a sale this month, a brand new program. Maps PPL, push, pull legs, three-day split, build your body, sculpt your body, shape your body. This program is brand new. It's only 40% off. It's actually 40% off, I should say, right now. Go to Maps. PPL.com.

Use the code PPL for the 40% discount. By the way, that comes with a diet guide, supplement guide. There's also an at-home dumbbell-only version. and there's a male and female version of the program. So go check it out, 40% off one more time. Maps at ppl.com. The code, PPL. Back to the show. All right, real quick, if you love us like we love you,

why not show it by rocking one of our shirts, hats, mugs, or training gear over at mindpumpstor.com. I'm talking right now, hit pause, head on over to mindpumpstor.com. That's it. Enjoy the rest of the show. If you've paid attention to nutrition advice for more than five seconds, you've probably heard the term macros.

What are macros? How do you calculate them? Are they important to track for your progress? If you want to lose body, fat, build muscle, doesn't matter. What are these things? And should you pay attention? We're going to talk about that today, how to calculate your macros. This dates us a little bit, but it makes me think of like,

can you recall when you first heard this term? So there's two terms that are thrown around in the space like crazy that there was a time when I never heard what either one of these were. PR and macros, I had no idea what that was 25 years ago. So I knew the term macro nutrient. Well, of course.

But not the, no, no, no. Yeah, yeah, people would say macros. Yeah, and you'd be like, macros, I have no idea what the hell of it. That, that wasn't that, well, maybe. It was IIFIM that made it popular. Yeah, I was probably like 10 years ago. Yeah, yeah, that's what I mean.

Macros had all these other acronyms. And CrossFit. And CrossFit. And that's another one. Amrap and PR and Wads were words that I had never heard anyone say just 20 years ago. Yeah, the first time I learned about macro. So macro is short for macronutrient. So when you look at food, just kind of like, you know, break down the basic here.

When you look at food, food is made up of nutrients. And you have micronutrients. And a micronutrient would be like a vitamin or a mineral, for example. And then you have what's called a macronutrient. So micro small, macro larger. And there's three macronutrients that you'll find in food. One of three, two of three, all three in food. And that's protein, fat, and carbohydrate.

So when you hear someone say macros, what they're referring to are proteins, are proteins and carbohydrates. That's basically it. And macros are what make up the calories. So when you look at a food, you look at a calorie total, let's say something has 500 calories, I can go in and see what is going to. what is making those calories up? How many grams of protein?

How many grams of carbohydrates and how many grams of fats? And an easy way to remember is proteins and carbs are four calories per gram. And fats are nine calories per gram. And that's pretty much it. There's nutrition. There is. Yeah, there's your course. That's it.

Yeah, but let's talk about in what case, are there certain cases where you are going to teach some, to track macros versus just calories. Yes. And I, and so this is where I want to go, I want to go with this conversation because I have found to be far more successful teaching people about macros than teaching people how to have a calorie budget. Yes.

Having a calorie budget to me is very entry level to understanding, you know, if you're eating too much or not enough for your body to gain weight or lose weight. which is bare, bare minimum entry of understanding weight loss or weight gain. Yes. But understanding your macros makes a huge difference, I think, in your success to body composition. And how you feel. Right. And it's also essential.

Right. You have to because two of the three macronutrients are essential. I mean, you have to eat a certain amount of them to survive. To survive. In other words, you could eat 10,000 calories. You could have a lot of food, but if you don't eat an adequate amount of the two essential macronutrients, proteins or fats, you'll actually starve your body. There's a famous story about this with hunters. I don't know exactly when this happened.

This was during the times of the frontier here in the U.S., I believe. And you had these hunters and trappers that would go out, and they would starve eating rabbits. And they would catch a lot of rabbits. They eat a lot of rabbits, but because they were so lean, they weren't able to consume enough of the essential macronutrient fat. And they would actually starve to death, even though they'd have so much food. Isn't there a term related to that? I believe it's rabbit starvation. There's a term for exactly that because of how common that was because you think that you're eating enough.

This is really popular on the show alone that I always talk about when I talk about where these guys get dropped off on a random island or place out in the middle. of nowhere. Alaska, it's a big thing. Yeah, Alaska was actually one of the last places they were at. And, you know, they don't have a hard time a lot of times catching rabbits with traps, but they're still freaked out because they're like, I can only survive so long on just eating rabbit meat because it's so lean. Yeah, not enough fat. Yeah, whale blubbers, you know, valuable up there. It's like, you know, that's one big resource that can get fat. Yeah. Yeah, so it's essential to understand macros because you need a certain amount of protein and fat. Now, carbohydrates are not essential. Okay. So that means you could go the rest of your

life technically, and I say technically, because there's more to this, but you could go the rest of your life technically never eating a carbohydrate and you won't die from malnutrition. Now, here's why I said technically. That doesn't mean it's ideal. Okay. So although there are cases and situations where a low or no carbohydrate diet might be beneficial. And you'll find this with medically advised ketogenic diets in some cases. Sometimes for gut health or depending on the situation, it'll be beneficial for a certain period of time.

But it's just for most people, it's not ideal. And they actually don't do very well on a diet that is without carbohydrates. Even though carbohydrates aren't essential, people tend to do better with them. It's usable energy. And yeah, it just makes, a lot of your physical efforts a lot easier. Not just that, but that you feel better and you start to notice hormone issues oftentimes.

And so although it's not essential, what I'm not communicating, what we're not saying is, you know, don't eat them because it's beneficial to eat them. But you definitely, definitely need a certain amount of protein and fat because if you go too low, it causes problems. In fact, I've had many times with clients, this was especially common in the late 90s and early 2000s when I was a personal trainer. you know, coming right out of the low fat era, where, you know, fat was so demonized, I would have female clients that were so afraid of consuming dietary fat that I'd see their, I'd look at their diets. And even though their calories were somewhat okay, their fat was so low that I would literally have them add an avocado and some olive oil. And boom, their health would just improve dramatically within days, most of the time,

within a week or two because they needed the fats. I also find getting a client to understand macros so important for just the individual variance too and how people feel. Yes. Right? So like I can't tell you how many times I've had a client that feels way better with a higher fat and a lower carbohydrate type of diet. And then vice versa, right?

Somebody will be much better off of a moderate fat to low fat and a much higher carbohydrate diet. And, you know, certain people will do really. well on protein up to a certain threshold. And then over that is too much and their digestive is off. So this is where really understanding your macros and what your body needs based off of your goals and your body where it's at. And then within that, you know, playing with those numbers and going like, oh, I seem to do better.

Good point. When I have more of this and less of that. And you know, you have like you said, your point, there's there's your essential numbers, and then you have like optimal, and optimal may look different for each individual. And I've found that, you know, it's not a, you know, sex by sex or weight class by weight class or goal by goal that changes. It's just there's an individual visual variance. If some people do better on a higher carbohydrate diet versus other people do better on a lower carbohydrate, some people do really well on really high fat versus moderately high fat.

And so until you kind of learn where, what does your body need? do we play with those additional calories within those, those macros? Great, great, great, great point. So let's start with protein. And we'll talk, we're going to talk in generalities, because there is an individual variance here, okay? But generally speaking, and this is true for most. So when I say general, this is actually true for most, A diet that is high in protein, much higher than what would be considered essential, does better for people regardless of the goal. Okay, so if you want to lose weight, if you want to lose body fat, if you want to build muscle, if you want to improve athletic performance, if you're looking at better cognitive health, there's even studies that show that this is beneficial for longevity, especially as, you get older, a higher protein diet works better, especially, especially for body composition change.

Almost always. Almost always. Yeah, I would say, unless you have that rare condition, because it can occasionally you do have somebody who has digestive issues at a high amount. Which I have a remedy for that. I was just going to say, there are options. So a lot of times what that is is actually playing with the type of protein many times. And or bumping fiber.

Right. So I've had lots of clients where we'll get real high protein, they get constipated. We'll add more fiber. Movement. And they're totally fine. Yeah. Agreed. So I would say that what you're saying is more often the rule than the exception.

Yes. Very, very rarely did I have to put somebody on a moderate or on the lower end of protein? Typically a higher protein diet for all goals tends to serve most people. So I'll go over what the data says. on high protein, and then I'll go over what coaches tend to recommend because they're a little different. Okay, and then I'll explain why, or we'll explain why there's a difference there. So here's what the data says on the upper limit from where you can see the benefit from protein intake. Okay. So in other words, they've done lots of studies on protein intake,

controlled calories for different goals, fat loss, muscle gain, athletic performance, health, all that stuff. And what the data seems to show is about 0.6 to 0.6 to 0.5.5. 0.8 grams of protein per pound of body weight is the upper limit of when you're going to see benefit. In other words, once you go above that, you tend to not see any more benefit. But right around there is where you're going to get the maximum benefit. Now, here's what coaches tend to promote. Here's what I tend to promote. Here's what my co-host will promote. One gram of protein per pound of target body weight. So let me explain why. Number one, I round up to one. Easier number to remember and 100% you're not going to hit this number every day.

Okay, so it's just, it's a hard number that 0.6 to 0.8 is hard to hit consistently. Yeah. And what I found as a trainer is when I tell people aim for one, more often than not, we fall within the 0.6 to 0.8 race. You're a lot closer to where you need to be. Then when I say 0.6 to 0.8. We also use target body weight because if you're really overweight and you just heard me say, 0.8 or 0.6 per pound of body weight. And you're like, well, I weigh 300 pounds.

Like, I got to eat 250 grams. Now you've got a math problem. Yeah, yeah. No, no, no, no. One gram of protein per pound of target body weight. So take whatever body weight you want to weigh that you think is probably good for you. That's your goal in grams of protein that you eat every single day. You have to talk about, too, the importance of hitting that number every single day consistently.

And it resets. It's not like a... You don't store it like carbohydrates or fat on your body. Amino acids are not. We don't really store amino acids very well. Muscle tissue, but for your body to start consuming amino acids from muscle, you're actually starving. So, yeah, no, protein is one of those things.

It's like, you could carb load. You could go, you know, your body has body fat, but protein doesn't work that way. It's pretty much a good idea, unless you're doing like a digestive system break or something like that. Every day. You want to hit this every single day. Yeah. So, in other words, high days and low days don't average out.

Right. Right. And that's, and why that's so important is because I think a lot of clients will look at it like, oh, I average this much. But then what they, they'll have these, they'll have two, three days that are really low. And then other days are really high. And so I found that most people struggle to do what you say, which is hit that point six to point eight consistently day in and day out. Yeah. So in other words, just to make it real clear, let's say your goal is it hit 130 grams of protein a day. And today you hit 180 grams of protein. You went 50 grams over. And tomorrow, you're, you're, you're, and tomorrow, you're, you're, you. hit 90 grams of protein. That means you only hit yesterday.

Yeah. And you still miss. And the extra 50 grams, it just was extra energy. Your body just took that and turned it into energy. It didn't get utilized in the ways that we want protein to get utilized. So you can't carry it over. So every single day, you hit your target body weight and grams of protein. And that generally, for the vast majority of people, works the best.

Yeah. Regardless of what your goals are. It builds that muscle tissue. Then we get to fat. Okay. And fats are interesting. Number one, you'll hear some news or some information on fats and how they affect your blood lipids, things like your LDL and HDL.

Some people, their blood lipids won't look so great if they eat too much saturated fat. You'll know if this is you by your blood tests. But I will say this, what the data is really interesting, when your calories aren't very high, especially if you're in a calorie deficit, meaning you're eating low enough calories to actually start losing weight, this doesn't make as big of a difference. Suddenly, your blood lipids are great regardless. And you'll see this interesting. People will eat, you know, fatty acid profiles that look like all saturated fat

because the calories are so low, everything looks great. So calories make a difference with this. Nonetheless, fats are essential. You need them for your hormones. You need them for cell integrity. Too low of fat is going to make you feel like crap. You're going to have low libido. You're going to have joint pain.

And your athletic performance were suffering. will suffer. Now, I know what the RDA says for essential fat. I think that is like so bare minimum. It's not even funny. Well, I think, I think, remember when we look at RDA, this isn't, that's not, they're not basing that off of people that strength train, say, two to four times a week. And so I think when you factor in somebody who is lifting weights, that number jumps up right away. I can't tell you how many times I took a female client in particular, both male and female, but female in particular client that was eating around what the RDA is and bump them 20 grams more a day. Huge benefits. Huge. Yeah.

Energy goes up. Notice a difference in their hormone profile. Their libido goes up, skin better, hair better. Just all around. And that's all we did was literally we just bump 20 grams. In my experience, women don't do well anything under 50 to 60 grams of protein. That tends to be the That takes to be the lowest. Now, I know the RDA says less than that. But in my experience, that's like as low as my clients will go without noticing some detrimental effects. And for men, it's around 70 to 80.

So for you, if you're listening to this right now, like, your number's probably around there at the low end. Now, that doesn't mean you can't have more. You could definitely go higher so long as it fits within your calories and what your targets are. But definitely don't go below that. I almost never let a client go below the numbers. In fact, I don't think I ever let anybody go.

No, I'm in the same. And this happens a lot when you have clients that are only eating 1,500 to 1900 calories. Because fat is high calorie. And they're trying to stay within their calorie budget. They end up going lower. This is another reason why I like focusing on macros a lot of times with clients more so than getting hyper-focused on the calories. A lot of times you have a client that's hyper-focused on that number with their calories. and they quickly put together like, oh, when I eat these high fat meals or fat foods, my calories go away really fast.

And so they steer to the really lean cuts of meat and skip out on the butter, skip out on the olive oil. They skip out on a lot of these things that are actually really good for us just to keep their calories where they want to. And you'd be far better off going over your 1,500 calorie budget to 16 to 1800 calories and hit your fat targets. than you are trying to get in your calorie range. Good point. And I find that that's the, the fitness space is so much messaging around, you know, oh, it's all about calorie balance. And, you know, stay, if you eat less, low enough calories and more or less than you,

you burn every day, you'll lose weight. And so you get people that get hyper-focused on that. And they neglect to hitting a good place of healthy fats for their body. And here they are trying to cut two, three-hundred calories just to hit this calorie budget. And then they're starving their body of optimal levels of fat, which their body would run so much better. They would build muscle better. They would burn body fat better. Their cravings are higher.

Yeah, cravings are through the roof. Yeah, because it's like, you cut the fat. It's like, that's a big satiating effect that you're missing out on. Like, it's, you know, a lot of times it kind of self-regulates when you focus more on the fat. Yeah, and I'd like to, you know, I would say, I used to say it this way. This is a total oversimplification. So forgive me. but calories will determine weight gain or weight loss.

Macros determine body composition and how you feel. So think of it that way. Again, this is an oversimplification, but it's a radical oversimplification. So before somebody clips this and says, oh, that's good. But generally speaking, you could have your calories be right and feel like total garbage. That's right. Your calories can be right for weight loss and lose just muscle. Your calories can be right for weight gain but just gain body fat because your macros are off.

So macros is like, why do I need to pay attention to macros? This is how you feel and this has to do with your body composition. Why don't we need to pay attention to calories? That's weight gain or weight loss. Well, go back to the example of what you, with like your hormone profile. Let's take the example of a female client who's eating only 1,500 calories. And let's say she's only clipping out 40 grams of fat. You bump her fat, which initially also bumps her calories and then all of a sudden she starts to lose weight.

Make sense of that. Yes. And that is really tough for someone to wrap their brain around. I was like, wait a second, I was doing, I was eating 50, I was eating less calories. You bump my calories, but we bumped it in fat and then all of a sudden their body sort of respond. That's what you needed. That's right.

And so I've seen that happen so many times when they are trying to hit that low calorie so hard that they sacrifice what their body needs on the fat side, which throws them off on the, on the hormone side, which then just makes your body rebel. When your hormone profile is off, you just, your body doesn't build muscle the same way. It doesn't burn body fat the same way. You're sleeping. is off, your libido's off. And all those things are just, just compile and make it worse and more difficult. All of a sudden, you give the body what it needs to be healthy. And even at a higher

calorie balance, it responds and builds that muscle or burns that body fat. And that's tough for people to understand. Totally. Then we get to carbohydrates. And carbohydrates are both complex and simple, simple as sugars. And complex carbohydrates tend to not make us feel as crappy as sugar does. It also doesn't taste as good. But that's the breakdown there. But carbohydrates, this, you could really flex in terms of up and down. And so once we get those minimums with fats, then you can play with making up the difference in your calories now with carbohydrates and either raising the fats, dropping the carbs,

or bringing the fats down to those minimums that we said and bumping the carbs and seeing how you feel. In my experience, working with a lot of clients, fats produce more satiety. So people, it also produces more flat levels of energy, but carbohydrates tend to help with athletic performance or performance in the gym. And so this is the game that you play with seeing how you feel. And then there's a pretty wild individual variance

when it comes to this. I have my best performance in the gym at about moderate carbs. Really, really high carbs. I actually don't get as great performance in the gym. I just don't feel as good. And I'm not the rule. I'm not the rule.

I'm more of the exception, but there are enough people like me that noticed it. So if you're getting those fat targets and your carbs are way up here, like, let me see how I feel by increasing my fats and dropping my carbs and my calories stay where I want them,

but the ratio was different. Let's see how I feel. Experiment with it. See how it affects it, how you perform. Yeah, I find I'm the opposite. I do really well on higher carbs. Yeah, yeah, I notice a big difference. I mean, I've talked about this many times

I had it down to like a number. Like if I had so many grams of carbohydrates before my workout, I would have a significant difference in my performance versus other. And I know you've talked about before, you could work out fasted and feel like you get just good of a workout where I'm not like that. And this is, again, I love to take the macros, figure out where my client needs to be protein-wise. So that one-to-one ratio, if you're male or female, we've talked about this.

If you're female over the 60, right around the 60 plus, so 60 to 70 grams, male over 80, figured out what your fat protein is. Okay, now the rest of that budget I can use with carbohydrates and see how that feels and then go from there. and that tends to work really well for most people. That's right. Now, there's two ways you can figure this out for yourself. One is the most accurate way, but it takes a lot of work. Two is to use a calculator online, which we have,

which will give you a good general number to start with. Now, I recommend starting with the general number and then working off that, or you could track your food every single day for two weeks to figure that out and get an exact number. But we have a calculator that uses a pretty good algorithm, them, and it's a general estimate. So it's never going to be 100% accurate. But it's going to give you a general estimate of how many calories you need and what macros you need for your specific goal.

And it's really easy to use. It'll literally take you 10 seconds. You plug in your age, your weight, your activity level, your goal. You know, a couple of other things you hit an enter, boom, it gives you a general idea of what your macro should be. It's that maps macro.com. My favorite part about the macro calculator is literally teaching people, because some people have no idea where to even start

and I will always stand by like making modifications for the individual. So using the macrocgrator is a great place to start. It's a great place to like, okay, I have no idea about macros or where I should be. Here, this will give you an idea. But then let's track that for a week and see how you feel. And then you start to make the modification they're talking about. And it's free. It's totally free.

It'll take you 10 seconds. It's Maps Macro.com. Go check it out. Also, if you like the show, come find us on Instagram. It's Mind Pump Media. Thank you for listening. to Mind Pump. If your goal is to build and shape your body, dramatically improve your health and energy, and maximize your overall performance, check out our discounted RGB Superbundle at Mind Pumpmedia.com.

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