By: Chris Gates

Whether you want to build muscle, burn fat, or just generally develop healthier habits, learning how to calculate your calories and macros is an unbelievably valuable skill.

All of those fitness goals (and more) require some type of strategy with your diet.

Because while working out is important, your nutrition is what will actually create the change you’re looking for.

I mean, think about it.

• If you want to lose weight, you need to be in a calorie deficit. Your diet plays a major role.
• If you want to build muscle, you need enough protein and calories for your body to build new muscle. Again, diet plays a major role.
• And if you simply want to live healthier, a large part of that will be incorporating whole, nutritious foods into your daily routine.

There’s no getting around it.

Your calories and macros play a huge role if you want to make progress.

And to manage your diet and your goals most effectively, you need to learn how to set yourself up for success.

So let’s dive into the details and talk about how to calculate your calories and macros so that you can reach your fitness goals!

Check out some of the AMAZING folks I get to work with, and how we’ve managed their diet and training to see amazing results!

Calories Explained

Since we’ll be talking about calories a lot in this article, I just want to make sure you know what a calorie actually is.

A calorie is a unit of energy.

So the calories you eat are energy coming into your body.

And whether you’re losing fat, gaining weight, or remaining weight stable depends on how much energy is coming in, while at the same time going out.

• To lose fat, a calorie deficit is required. This means you’re eating fewer calories than you burn each day.
• To build muscle, it’s typically best to be in a slight calorie surplus. This means you’re eating more calories than your body burns.
• In order to maintain your current bodyweight, your daily calories coming in should be the same as your daily calories burned. This is called maintenance.

Now, I don’t recommend that you try to calculate the calories you burn. That’s a losing battle.

There’s no practical way to know how many calories you’re burning. But you can track your nutrition and monitor your bodyweight (among other things) in order to figure out whether you’re in a deficit, surplus, or at maintenance.

In my opinion, tracking your calories (at least for a little while) is the most efficient and effective way to make sure your diet is in alignment with your goals.

Macros Explained

What’s cool is that your diet — your daily calories — are made up of three macronutrients:

• Protein
• Fats
• Carbohydrates

And when you tally all three of those up, they actually make up the total calorie count of all of the foods and meals you eat.

I don’t think a lot of people know that, but it’s true.

If you look at any nutrition facts label, you’ll see the protein, fats, and carbohydrates are listed in bold lettering.

You can take the grams associated with each one and multiply it by each macro’s calorie count (which I’ll explain below) and get the total calories for that food.

And that little detail is really important, because when you know how to calculate your calories and macros, you can play around with the different variables in your diet to make it sustainable and effective.

A Flexible Approach is Key

Let’s spend a minute talking about a flexible approach before we dive into each individual macronutrient.

Because this is really important.

I just mentioned the words “sustainable” and “effective” for a reason.

When you learn how to calculate your calories and macros, you can create a diet plan that you really love.

There are no rules and regulations.

• You don’t have to eliminate carbs to lose weight.
• Keto, carnivore, Atkins, or any other diet with a “name” is not required for you to make progress.
• There’s no need to eliminate all of your favorite foods. In fact, there really aren’t any “unhealthy” foods at all.

There’s just your relationship with the foods you eat.

And so, you can build a diet for yourself that not only includes a lot of whole, nutritious foods that will support your health and build your body up. But you can also make room for your favorite snacks, indulgences, and treats on a consistent basis.

At the end of the day, if you’re hitting your calories and macros (combined with the right training principles), you WILL make the progress you want.

That’s not to say you can just eat Pop Tarts and protein shakes every day. A diet full of lean protein sources, fruits, vegetables, and nutritious fat and carb sources is important.

But you can fit in all types of foods and still reach your goals.

An approach I like to take with my clients is the 80-20 rule.

• 80 percent of your diet comes from whole, nutritious foods.
• The other 20 percent can come from whatever you want.

That’s the flexible, sustainable, effective approach you should aim for.

How to Calculate Your Calories and Macros: Protein

Alright, let’s break down some important, need-to-know information about each macronutrient to help you learn how to calculate your calories and macros.

And we’ll start with protein, because it’s the most important macronutrient in your diet plan.

If you want to change your body composition, protein plays a major role.

• It helps your body repair itself, recover, and grow new muscle tissue.
• It also helps increase the feeling of fullness after each meal.

So eating enough protein on a consistent basis is extremely important.

But how much should you eat?

Your ideal amount of protein depends on a lot of different factors, but the following guidelines can get you in the right ballpark:

• If you’re at or near a healthy bodyweight, aim for 1 gram of protein per pound of bodyweight, per day (Ex: 150 pounds = 150 grams of protein).
• If you’re a very small individual, or very overweight or obese, take your height in centimeters and eat that many grams of protein per day (Ex: 180 cm = 180 grams of protein).

And once you get your protein goal in place, you’ll be able to figure out how many calories in your diet are allocated to protein.

Because 1 gram of protein = 4 calories.

So if you’re eating 150 grams of protein a day, that means 600 calories in your daily diet are coming from protein.

Remember that, because we’ll use it later on in this article.

How to Calculate Your Calories and Macros: Fats

Fat is the second macronutrient for us to cover, and it also plays an important role.

• Fat provides fuel for your workouts.
• It’s also very important for regulating your hormones.
• And oftentimes, fat makes foods taste better and it makes your diet more enjoyable. That can’t be understated.

But here’s the catch.

One gram of fat has 9 calories. It’s the most calorie-dense macronutrient.

Meaning, your calories from fat are going to add up quicker than protein or carbs.

And that’s not a bad thing. It’s just something to be aware of.

Generally speaking, here are some ballpark numbers you can shoot for in your diet:

• For men, allocate ~25 percent of your daily calories to fat.
• Women can allocate ~7-10 percent higher than that.

So let’s talk about how to calculate your calories and macros with those targets in mind.

Say you’re eating 2,000 calories a day.

If you’re a man, you could plan to eat around 55 grams of fat a day.

If you’re a woman, you might shoot for 75 grams of fat a day.

How to Calculate Your Calories and Macros: Carbohydrates

The last macronutrient we’ll talk about here is carbohydrates. And honestly, there’s a lot of misinformation when it comes to carbs.

So many fat loss diets involve large reductions in carbs — or even completely eliminating them. And that’s just not necessary, nor is it optimal.

• Carbs are your body’s most readily available energy source for working out.
• They actually assist your body in the process of building muscle as well.
• And honestly, in most cases carbs make your diet more fun and sustainable, which is really important.

But the thing about carbs is they’re technically “non-essential.” You don’t NEED carbs (but I’d highly recommend you consume them).

So the easiest way to calculate your carbohydrates is to just allocate all remaining calories to this macronutrient.

Let me explain by mapping out an example below.

How Many Calories Should You Start With?

Your starting point for how to calculate your calories and macros will be based around a total daily calorie allotment, in most cases.

But how do you figure out how many calories to eat?

Unfortunately, there’s no sure-fire way to figure out the answer to that question. You can’t plug your information into a calculator and get the exact right answer.

But you CAN get close. And with some careful tracking and attention to detail, you’ll be able to get your daily calories correct pretty quickly.

• Option No. 1: Take your goal bodyweight and multiply it by 12. The result is how many calories you should eat to get to that bodyweight. This option is super simple, and it works for most people. It’s a great tool if you’re trying to lose weight. (Ex: Goal bodyweight of 150 pounds X 12 = 1,800 calories per day).
• Option No. 2: Look up a BMR calculator online and use it to get a ballpark starting point for your maintenance calories. This option will require you to then track your diet, your bodyweight, and your training performance for at least two weeks to determine whether or not adjustments need to be made.
• Option No. 3: Skip all of the calculations and just start tracking your diet, weighing yourself, and monitoring your progress. This strategy is probably going to be the most accurate and effective over time, but once again it will likely require you to make slight adjustments after a week or two.

A fourth option would be to hire a coach. A good coach can help ensure you’re doing things correctly and take all of the guesswork out of your plan so that you can just show up, put in the work, and know that what you’re doing is working.

Whatever option you choose, you should be able to get a decent starting point for setting up your calories.

And the information below will help you fine-tune your macros so that you can get your diet optimized for your goals!

How to Calculate Your Calories and Macros: Example Maintenance Plan

OK, let’s say you’re a man who’s 180 pounds/180 cm tall and you’ve determined that your maintenance calories are 2,500 per day.

With just that information, you can get off to a really good start with how to calculate your calories and macros.

1. Right off the bat, protein is easy. You should probably aim for around 180 grams of protein per day (which is 720 calories).
2. In terms of fat, 25 percent of 2,500 calories is 625. When you divide that by 9 (1 gram of fat = 9 calories), it gives you 70 grams of fat per day.
3. For carbs you’ve got 1,350 calories remaining, which means you should eat 337 grams of carbohydrates each day (1,350 divided by 4, because 1 gram of carbs has 4 calories).

Voila!

You’ve calculated your calories and macros for maintenance.

How to Calculate Your Calories and Macros: Weight Loss Example

OK, so what if that man wants to lose body fat?

You can make some simple tweaks to get in a calorie deficit.

First and foremost, you need to reduce calories. Since this guy’s maintenance calories are 2,500 per day, we can reduce that number to 2,200 to start his fat loss diet.

Within those 2,200 calories, here’s how I’d recommend he adjust his macros.

1. Protein stays the same. Regardless of your goal, this number really shouldn’t change. 180 grams of protein.
2. Fat should still be around 25 percent of his total calories, so we’d bring that down to ~60 grams of fat per day.
3. And once again, carbs can account for the rest of the available calories. In this scenario, we’d drop carbs to 235 grams per day.

Simple. Easy. Effective.

How to Calculate Your Calories and Macros: Building Muscle Example

But what if that guy’s primary goal is to build muscle — not fat loss?

Well, we can go back to his maintenance numbers and adjust things in the other direction.

Since his maintenance calories are set at 2,500 calories, we can bump that up to 2,800 calories to put him in a modest calorie surplus. And within those 2,800 calories, we can assign the following macronutrient goals:

1. Once again, protein remains the same: 180 grams per day.
2. Fats can be increased slightly, since he will be eating slightly more calories. Twenty five percent of 2,800 calories ends up coming in right around 78 grams of fat.
3. A total of 1,422 calories are accounted for with protein and fats, which means the remaining 1,378 calories in his diet can be allocated to carbs: 345 grams.

That should give his body everything it needs to start recovering, repairing, and growing new muscle.

I Hope This Helps!

As you can see, once you know some of the basic information about macronutrients and calories, it gets pretty simple to learn how to calculate your calories and macros.

And here’s one really cool nugget of information I’ll end this article with.

You really only have to do this once.

Because once you calculate a starting point and begin tracking your progress, you’ll just be making small tweaks to your plan occasionally over time.

For instance, if you start by getting in a surplus to build muscle, and then six months down the road you want to lose some body fat, you don’t need to recalculate everything to start your fat loss phase.

You can just reduce calories from where you’re at, tweak your macros, and keep going.

So make sure you bookmark this article so that you can always come back to it and figure out what tweaks to make.

And if you’re interested in getting help with both your diet and training plan, I’d love to help! Head over to my coaching page to learn more about how 1-on-1 online fitness coaching works, and submit your application.

Thanks for reading!

~ Chris