Tracking Exercise from a Macro Standpoint
When it comes to tracking your macros, you put EVERYTHING into your tracking application - and I do mean everything. You track your proteins, carbs, fat, fiber, the oils you use to cook, your water intake, etc.
But there are some varying schools of thought on whether or not you should track your exercise when it effects your macros. At Always Growing, we say no tracking of exercise in the apps, but encourage you to always track your workouts for fitness purposes such as improving your weights/benchmarks over time.
In apps like My Fitness Pal, when you add your exercise to your daily tracking, it converts that exercise into an estimated amount of calories burned during that period of exercise. When this happens, it adds more calories to your daily intake allowance. So if you started with 1,500 calories allotted to you for the day, and you burn 250 calories on the elliptical that morning, you're now able to consume 1, 750 calories that day.
This becomes a problem when the macro calculations have already taken into account your average exercise levels. Our macronutrient profiles take into consideration your current body weight, your body type, your goals and your exercise levels already without you tracking them based on the average number of hours per week you are active. By adding exercise and calories burned, you can significantly skew and overestimate the calories you should be consuming daily.
Not to mention that these are estimations only. As unique individuals, we burn calories at different rates and all machines are making estimated guesses on how many we have burn - aka they aren't always accurate. When you're doing an activity such a CrossFit, the app can't take into account how many pull ups and cleans you did at what weight, or how high your heart rate was. When you're climbing a mountain, the app can't determine what grade increase there was or again, how high your heart rate was.
Therefore, tracking your exercise can negatively affect your results, especially if you're goal is to lose weight. Your coach has taken all of this into account already for you, and we love that you're hitting an extra round of cardio on any given day, but let it be an extra bonus for you and leave the adjusting of macros to us.
Deidre founded Always Growing Nutrition in 2015 with an enthusiasm for health, fitness, and understanding how to optimize the human body. She approaches nutrition from the perspective that each body is unique and this is key to creating nutrition programs that are sustainable for each person to maintain long-term, but also programs that work.
Her passions lie in digestive and hormone health, and she loves working with clients who struggle with balancing these complex systems. She believes that everyone deserves personalized nutrition, to understand how their body works, and to have the support to get answers about their health. She has worked with hundreds of clients to create a body they love with food they love.
When she's not working with clients, you'll find her enjoying everything Colorado has to offer from hiking to camping to craft beers.