could I be eating too much fat?

I wanted to see how my macronutrients have been adding up since I've started to track my food online every day.

I use MyPlate at Livestrong.com and I love love love it. Except for one minor flaw (when you enter food manually, it only lets you enter calories, no macros like protein, carbs or fats, etc), it is a really helpful tool to aid you in weight loss (or gain). I've tried SparkPeople.com but I didn't find it as user friendly as MyPlate.

Most of the food I eat I can find searching their database. It's smart and saves food you eat a lot into a "favorite" category and it makes finding that food quicker. I can easily change portion sizes, whether it's cups, tsp, oz, etc. I can track my water intake. I can track my calories burned by entering them manually or finding specific exercises in their database, log miles, log heart rate, and much more. There is a constant bar at the top that fills as I eat throughout the day so I know how much I've eaten and how much I have left to eat. It also breaks the day's calories up by meals, so I can track my macros per meal. And at the end of the day, I have a lovely pie chart that shows my ratios of carbs/protein/fat.

Another nice thing is that as my weight changes, it will change my caloric needs for me. Or you have the option to enter your calorie goal manually. VERY helpful.

So today, I decided to average out how my pie chart has been over the past 11 days. Very interesting to me. Here they are:

On average, each day I'm getting 38% from carbs, 33% from protein, and 29% from fat.
Here's how I want it to look: 50/30/20

It's shocking to me to discover how low my carb percentage is, even though I'm not even trying to go lower carb. In fact, not one single day did I get to 50%. Not even on my splurge day. I got close, 49%, but never hit 50%. My protein is surprisingly adequate. But what really gets me is how easy it is to eat too much fat. It's from good fat (mostly), but it's still on the higher end. I would be really interested in tracking these numbers on a week where I wasn't specifically trying to eat a certain way. I bet I would be just as shocked.

What this tells me is that I should try to eat more carbs and less fat. Which is completely backwards from how my mind seems to be programmed. After the "low fat craze" of the past that wasn't necessarily the best fad diet that ever was and then the "low carb craze" that still doesn't seem to have gone away, it seems almost wrong to try and eat more carbs and less fat. All this time I've thinking I eat too many carbs, but maybe not. Maybe I'm not as "carb sensitive" as I once thought. Maybe I'm just eating too much fat. Even too much of a good thing can be bad.

A calorie is a calorie, right? I know it's not the same when you think of a 400 calorie slice of cake compared to a 400 calorie meal composed of healthy foods, but that's not what I mean. What I mean is, at the end of the day, the extra calories from olive oil, avocados, lean meats, etc will add up just the same as junk calories. The healthy fats will definitely fill you up better, probably causing you to intake less calories overall than if you just constantly fed your face with junk, but it adds up just the same.

So, it is quite possible to believe that the amount of fat I'm eating could be the culprit, not the carbs as I've always thought. We will see. Too early in the game to tell and I'm not going to change anything yet.

There was ONE day out of the 11 that I ate near perfect according to how I wanted. March 16th I had 50/30/20. And now, if I want, I can go back to that day and use it as a reference point if I wanted to change my eating habits. MyPlate....one helpful tool!

Interesting information

I came across some interesting information the other day. A figure competitor I follow had posted something on Facebook that intrigued me. She said that she had her bodyfat percentage measured with this thing called the Bod Pod.

Bod Pod

Anyway, I guess it very accurately measures your bodyfat. I had never heard of this thing before! According to the Bod Pod, her bodyfat percentage was at 22% and she was blown away because her gym's calipers said she was at 16%. And she came to find out that she had been eating too few net calories (net calories are calories consumed minus calories burned) and if she goes too low below her RMR then losing body fat will be impossible. (RMR is resting metabolic rate)

Interesting....

I'd NEVER read that information ANYWHERE. And I've read a TON about this stuff over the past 5-6 years, trust me. First of all, I hadn't ever heard of RMR (I had heard of BMR) and I wanted to know what the difference was and why you won't lose fat if you eat fewer calories than your RMR.

According to this website I found, RMR, or resting metabolic rate, is the calories you would burn if you did nothing but rest for 24 hours. And per their calculator, my RMR is 1223. So if I did nothing for 24 hours, my body would require 1223 calories for energy.

Now this woman says that if you go below this number, it is impossible to lose fat. I would assume that since your body is using all it's resources for keeping you alive and functioning, it's not wasting any to help you lose fat at that point.

So, if for instance if I ate 1500 calories today, then burned off 400 calories at the gym, my net calories is 1100 (which is 123 calories under my RMR). So while it looks fantastic from a calorie deficit perspective, if I continually do this, I will not lose fat.

If I eat too much, I won't lose fat. If I eat too little, I won't lose fat. And how can I eat within that perfect range of calories required for fat loss long enough to actually see a loss in fat??

Another thing I was confused about was that to take the RMR calculation further, and factor in activity level, that drives the RMR number up. For me, it goes somewhere between 1600 and 1800. Then which number am I supposed to take note of when making sure not to go below it: the one factoring in exercise or not? Because there is a big difference between 1223 calories and 1896 calories.

It's food for thought though. Interesting theory indeed. Wouldn't it be cool if we could be implanted with some sort of chip that sent us data like how many calories we need, how many we actually burn and how many we actually consume on a daily basis?? If I were a scientist, this is what my life's ambition would be. Will someone please invent this? It would make my life infinitely easier ;)