Practical Guides
How to track your macros: a beginner's guide
Tracking is a measurement tool, not a lifestyle. Used well it teaches you what's in your food; used badly it becomes an anxiety generator.
Step 1: set your targets
Start with total calories based on your TDEE and goal, then set protein first (1.6–2.2 g/kg if you train), fat next (at minimum 20% of calories to support hormone production and fat-soluble vitamin absorption), and let carbohydrate fill the remainder.[1] Our macro calculator does this arithmetic for you, or you can work it out by hand.
Step 2: weigh, at first
For the first two or three weeks, weigh food in grams rather than using cups or eyeballing. Not forever — the point is calibration. Most people substantially underestimate portions of calorie-dense foods (oil, nut butter, cheese, rice) and overestimate protein portions. Once you've seen what 150 g of chicken actually looks like, you can estimate without a scale reasonably well.
Step 3: handle the awkward cases
- Recipes — log the raw ingredients once, save the recipe, then log portions of it. Weigh the finished dish so you can divide it accurately.
- Eating out — pick the closest reasonable database match and move on. Precision here is impossible, and chasing it is the fastest route to giving up.
- Cooked vs. raw — weights differ substantially as food loses or absorbs water. Pick one convention and stay consistent.
- Alcohol — contributes 7 kcal/g and fits no macro category cleanly. See alcohol and macros.
Step 4: know when to stop
Tracking has done its job when you can look at a plate and estimate its macros within a reasonable margin. Many people track for a few months, then move to tracking only protein, or only occasionally to recalibrate. If tracking starts driving anxiety around food, that's a signal to stop and consider a less rigid approach such as intuitive eating — a tool that makes eating worse isn't working.
Keep reading: Macro calculator · Calculate macros by hand · IIFYM and flexible dieting