Nutrition Lesson 2: Calories and Macronutrients
Welcome to nutrition lesson number 2! Today I’ll be talking about Calories and Macronutrients.
Calories are units of energy. For the most part everything we eat and drink contains calories with some exceptions like water, spices and diet soda.
Each person burns a different amount of calories each day depending on how much they weigh, how much fat they have, how much muscle they have, their metabolic rate, and how active they are.
Let’s say a person is burning an average of 2000 calories per day consistently and eating an average 2400 calories per day. Eventually that person will gain weight. Now if they are burning 2000 and eating 1600 they will eventually lose weight. Our body takes the food we eat, uses as much energy as we need to make our brain and bodily systems function and then stores the excess as fat.
The calories in our food come from three macronutrients: Carbohydrates, Fat and Protein. I’m going to give a brief overview of what each does for our bodies and what foods are high in that macronutrient.
Starting with carbs! Carbs are broken down into glucose and released into our bloodstream for energy. Our brains need about 130g of glucose per day just to function! Carbs are the first line of energy for the body because they are processed the quickest.
There are two types of carbs, simple and complex. We want to get the majority of our carb intake from complex carbs because they are processed slower. Slow digesting carbs usually keep us full longer, and travel through our GI tract with micronutrients (vitamins and minerals), fiber and water, sometimes protein and healthy fats too. They slowly release their energy into our body. This keeps bloody sugar and insulin stable.
Examples of complex carbs are vegetables, fruits, legumes (beans, lentils, peas), and whole grains.
Simple carbs are very fast processing and give us a spike in energy then a quick crash. Simple carbs are things like fruit juice, alcohol, candy, chips, french fries, table sugar, and soda. These are the types of carbs we want to limit as much as possible because they are high in calories and leave us feeling hungry without sustained energy.
Let’s move on to Fats! There are 3 types of fats saturated fat, monounsaturated fat and polyunsaturated fat.
Fat helps make and balance hormones (especially sex hormones), forms cell membranes, forms our brain and nervous system, helps transport fat soluble vitamins, and gives us omega-6 and omega-3 fatty acids that our bodies cannot make on our own.
It’s best to get an equal mix of fats. So here are examples of each:
Saturated: Beef, pork and lamb, eggs, dairy, coconut, cacao- this type of fat is usually solid at room temp
MonoUnsaturated: nuts except walnuts, canola oil lard, olives, chicken, duck, sunflower oil, pistachios.
Polyunsaturated: chia seeds, corn oil, cod liver oil, fish, flaxseeds, hemp seeds, mayonnaise, pine nuts, sesame seeds, soybean oil, walnuts.
Alright our last macro is Protein! You can think of protein as the muscle building macro but it does more than that!
Protein is broken down into amino acids in the body that can be used for energy, making muscle, skeletal and connective tissues, neurotransmitters, enzymes, immune system chemicals, and carrier proteins.
Almost all foods contain some amount of protein.
Foods that contain a small amount of protein are broccoli,peanut butter, baked potato, avocado, quinoa,
Foods high in protein are lean meat, poultry, fish and seafood eggs, dairy, protein powders, beans and legumes, tempe and tofu.
So this week’s task is to start to get familiar with what types of macros you generally eat and how they make you feel. Notice if you can start to identify carbs, protein and fats and which ones you eat more or less of! Thanks for joining me for nutrition lesson 2. Stay tuned for more lessons to come!