As long as it fits in your macros for the <insert time period>

[EmperorRyker]

So I was wondering what consitutes a time period within which that famous quote "as long as it fits in your macros" applies?

I don't know whether going on a meal to meal basis is bro-science, but I can't seem to figure out why that time period would be a day, a week or any other specific time period. Why wouldn't your body build / break muscle / fat on a meal to meal basis? If it doesn't, why does everyone say it's cool to eat anything as long as it fits in your macros for the DAY. Why not a day and a half? And then when someone deviates from their macros for the day, the answer is it's cool as long as it fits in your macros for the WEEK. Why not a month, a year even?

I'm having a hard time imagining someone would keep the same body composition if he would eat 5 days straight, starve for 2 days, compared to eating normal the whole week, assuming the calories ingested per week would be the same.

Am I in the wrong here? I'm not saying your body will function significantly different when doing this, but is it then really true that it makes NO difference when, how many times and how much per meal you eat in a day?

[chosenone28]

This was also a question I had awhile back but I was unable to frame it correctly. I thank you sir. I hope someone who has some knowledge like Alan, Layne, Dr. Horse, WaffleIron, Emma, and maybe even Chris Aceto could provide a response.

[mc4_a]

The idea here is to keep with consistent amounts of calories and macros over the long run. The short periods of time (say 6-12 hours) are fairly irrelevant, it's about how it averages out over long periods of time (the studies seem to back up periods of time a long as 24-36 hours after a workout). Why people break it up by day is because it's an easy line in the sand (sleep cycle to sleep cycle).

That being said, you can put calories to better use by calorie / carb cycling for each meal or each day, which seems to work as an optimizing measure for a lot of people, but it's more work.

Here's the thing. It's not going to make a huge difference. When you get to this level it's about improving things by maybe a few percentage points, if that much.

[chosenone28]

The idea here is to keep with consistent amounts of calories and macros over the long run. The short periods of time (say 6-12 hours) are fairly irrelevant, it's about how it averages out over long periods of time (the studies seem to back up periods of time a long as 24-36 hours after a workout). Why people break it up by day is because it's an easy line in the sand (sleep cycle to sleep cycle).

That being said, you can put calories to better use by calorie / carb cycling for each meal or each day, which seems to work as an optimizing measure for a lot of people, but it's more work.

Here's the thing. It's not going to make a huge difference. When you get to this level it's about improving things by maybe a few percentage points, if that much.

Alright. I am really just interested is all. I do moderate to intense weight training every day so that 24-36 hour thing is almost constant for me. My thoughts were more so if I am eating 2100 calories on a 24 hour basis and maintaining weight and I wanted to cut or bulk and i could successfully cut fat by droping calories will say 20%, but on said day I only droped them 15%, next day exactly 20%, and then compensated two days later at 25%, would it really make any major difference. I take it your opinion is no. Fair enough. It just seems that there should be some kind of "cut off" point.

Yes. Its over complicating things. I like to think about these sort of things though. But dont worry I am not going to cry if i miss my macros today by 5%. Not alot anyway.

[signature166]

So I was wondering what consitutes a time period within which that famous quote "as long as it fits in your macros" applies?

I don't know whether going on a meal to meal basis is bro-science, but I can't seem to figure out why that time period would be a day, a week or any other specific time period. Why wouldn't your body build / break muscle / fat on a meal to meal basis? If it doesn't, why does everyone say it's cool to eat anything as long as it fits in your macros for the DAY. Why not a day and a half? And then when someone deviates from their macros for the day, the answer is it's cool as long as it fits in your macros for the WEEK. Why not a month, a year even?

I'm having a hard time imagining someone would keep the same body composition if he would eat 5 days straight, starve for 2 days, compared to eating normal the whole week, assuming the calories ingested per week would be the same.

Am I in the wrong here? I'm not saying your body will function significantly different when doing this, but is it then really true that it makes NO difference when, how many times and how much per meal you eat in a day?

The day is a useful tool for organizing your daily macronutrient intake. Published guidelines, derived from data from nutritional intervention studies, report macronutrient ranges in the form of g/kg/day, or % of daily caloric intake, or x-y servings per day. BMR calculators report estimated daily caloric intake. The day is a convenient, discrete unit for most people. Your day begins when you wake up and ends when you go to sleep (for most). Either way you have become accustomed to some sort of daily routine.

I'm sure you have an overall goal in mind. For most people on here their overall goal is to get big, strong, and ripped or at least big and ripped. Reaching either of those overall goals will require breaking the overall goal down into smaller, more specific, more manageable goals. Each specific goal will drive the design of your training program, diet, and supplementation regime for a period of time (Depending on the specificity of your goal this could be an exact date, as for a bodybuilding competition, or more of a range, as in wanting to have visible abs by beach season).

If you want to reach your specific goal by the date you set or within the acceptable range, then you will need to plan your macronutrient consumption according to that goal. How do you go about doing that? You know generally that if you want to gain muscle mass you should consume a caloric surplus over time, if you want to lose fat that you should create a caloric deficit over time, and if you want to maintain then you should consume as much as you expend. So you seek out information about different mass gaining diets or different fat loss diets. You choose the diet that you deem best for reaching your goal or you design your own using the information that you gathered (taking into consideration that your diet must support your training program).

Armed with your diet, you begin the process of reaching your goal by planning your macronutrient consumption. Your specific goal includes a time component. Apply your diet to the time period to determine your macro targets for that time period.

Now you can say to people "as long as it fits in my macros for my goal-determined time period" then it doesn't matter. If you want to stop here and start eating, then jump right in. Assuming that you have a modicum of discipline and self-control, I guess, if you aren't the organized, planning-driven type, you could simply eat at will while keeping track of your macro consumption. Compare your cumulative macro consumption to your targets for the time period to make sure that you hit your target. The first obvious problem with this method: let's say you are 10 days from the end of your goal and you have overeaten a macro by any number of calories, then its impossible for you to hit your macro target for that time period. Here's the second problem with this method: unless by luck you eat perfectly, such that your total macronutrient intake from eating at will exactly matches your target macros, you must refer to a smaller period of time (or to the level of an individual meal itself) in order to adjust your intake to hit your target macros for the goal time period. If there are 15 days left in your goal time period and you have x calories left to consume to hit your macro target, then you must find a way to distribute those x calories over the 15 remaining days. However you partition the remaining calories, you must refer to a period of time (or to the number of remaining meals) smaller than that of the target period.

Also, unless you were lucky enough to choose and implement a near-optimal diet, you will want to adjust your caloric intake and/or macro distribution during the goal time period if you aren't making reasonable progress towards your goal. Regardless if it is total calories or macro distribution, you must refer to a smaller period of time (or to the meal itself) to make the needed adjustments.

I'll set the goal time period as the largest unit of measurement for targeting macro consumption and an individual gram as the smallest unit of measurement for targeting macro consumption--everything else is included in this spectrum. Talking about anything longer than the goal time period or anything less than a gram is essentially meaningless.

Again, if you choose to use longer periods of time for targeting macro consumption, you must refer to smaller periods of time or smaller units of measurement in order to reach your goals. You can talk about "macros for the year" as much as you like, but when implementing the diet you will need to break the year down into months, fortnights, weeks, days, meals, lbs, sips or bites, or grams, there is no getting around this (you can use any arbitrary unit you want 1.5 days, 3 weeks, etc but it will be the same).

What happens if you plan at the level of the gram? Besides being nearly impossible to carry out, you will risk driving yourself crazy. Same goes for the bite or the sip. In any event, if you analyze macronutrient targets at the level of the gram, then you must refer back to a period of time to implement your gram-based planning. If you decide you need 45,000 g of carbs for a 3 month mass gaining-phase, then you must refer to periods of time (or individual meals) to distribute these grams. Same thing goes for bites and sips.

What happens if you plan at the level of the individual meal? Based on the wording of your initial question, you would have to ask yourself if your macros for the meal fit within your macros for the meal. Well, how did you determine your macros for the meal in the first place? You determined your macros for the meal by dividing your goal time period macro targets by the number of meals in the goal time period. You had to refer to another unit to determine your per-meal macro targets.

So, larger periods of time aren't useful for implementation of macro targeting independent of, or without reference to, smaller periods of time or smaller units of measurement. And, smaller periods of time or units of measurement aren't useful independent of, or without reference to, larger periods of time.

However you decide to "hit your macros" make sure to begin with a specific goal. Use the specific goal to choose a diet. Then use the diet to help you determine your macro targets. Divide those macros up however you see fit, making sure that your method enables you to track your progress and adjust as needed.

What about diets with nonlinear intake? Cyclical diets, by their nature, allow for easy organization of macro intake. Use one cycle as the primary organizational unit, then distribute the macros to the smaller units of the cycle as required by the diet. High-carb days require more carbs than low-carb days, etc. This holds for carb-cycling, cyclical ketogenic diet, etc.

In some diets, small-scale macro distribution is determined by your training program. More carbs/calories on training days than non-training days. This is true for the targeted ketogenic diet and other non-linear diets.

What about intermittent fasting? Depending on the specific IF diet that you choose, the cycle or the day will determine macro targets.

As a practical matter, what is apparently obvious but for some reason has remained hidden to me up until now, the day is the best tool for macro distribution because most diets are organized around the day. Most people who follow a specific diet are trying to hit daily macro targets because thats how the diet is laid out.

As far as your question about eating for 5 days and then starving yourself for two, research, and the results that people have gotten from IF, have shown that it is not necessary to spread your daily macros over 5-6 meals each day, that what matters, for purposes of body composition, is that you hit your macros at the end of the day.

"Why wouldn't your body build / break muscle / fat on a meal to meal basis?" It just doesn't work that way. The processes involved in muscle and fat building and breakdown can be measured on a meal-to-meal basis, but it does not follow that each individual meal causes these processes to begin or end, speed up or slow down. Whether or not muscle is being built or fat is being lost depends on a whole host of factors that have little to do with the macronutrient composition of an individual meal. The cumulative effect of individual meals over time carries greater weight, but there are still other important factors to consider.

Factors that you can control such as training intensity, frequency, volume, cardio and other exercise. Recovery, sleep, hydration, dietary adherence. Other factors over which you have little or no control: stress, illness, injury, your age, your gender, the time of day, the time of the month, your training age.

All of these factors (and probably others that I missed) when taken together determine whether or not, at any instant in time or over any given period of time, the net effect of the relevant processes in your body is building or breaking muscle or fat.

[chosenone28]

The day is a useful tool for organizing your daily macronutrient intake. Published guidelines, derived from data from nutritional intervention studies, report macronutrient ranges in the form of g/kg/day, or % of daily caloric intake, or x-y servings per day. BMR calculators report estimated daily caloric intake. The day is a convenient, discrete unit for most people. Your day begins when you wake up and ends when you go to sleep (for most). Either way you have become accustomed to some sort of daily routine.

I'm sure you have an overall goal in mind. For most people on here their overall goal is to get big, strong, and ripped or at least big and ripped. Reaching either of those overall goals will require breaking the overall goal down into smaller, more specific, more manageable goals. Each specific goal will drive the design of your training program, diet, and supplementation regime for a period of time (Depending on the specificity of your goal this could be an exact date, as for a bodybuilding competition, or more of a range, as in wanting to have visible abs by beach season).

If you want to reach your specific goal by the date you set or within the acceptable range, then you will need to plan your macronutrient consumption according to that goal. How do you go about doing that? You know generally that if you want to gain muscle mass you should consume a caloric surplus over time, if you want to lose fat that you should create a caloric deficit over time, and if you want to maintain then you should consume as much as you expend. So you seek out information about different mass gaining diets or different fat loss diets. You choose the diet that you deem best for reaching your goal or you design your own using the information that you gathered (taking into consideration that your diet must support your training program).

Armed with your diet, you begin the process of reaching your goal by planning your macronutrient consumption. Your specific goal includes a time component. Apply your diet to the time period to determine your macro targets for that time period.

Now you can say to people "as long as it fits in my macros for my goal-determined time period" then it doesn't matter. If you want to stop here and start eating, then jump right in. Assuming that you have a modicum of discipline and self-control, I guess, if you aren't the organized, planning-driven type, you could simply eat at will while keeping track of your macro consumption. Compare your cumulative macro consumption to your targets for the time period to make sure that you hit your target. The first obvious problem with this method: let's say you are 10 days from the end of your goal and you have overeaten a macro by any number of calories, then its impossible for you to hit your macro target for that time period. Here's the second problem with this method: unless by luck you eat perfectly, such that your total macronutrient intake from eating at will exactly matches your target macros, you must refer to a smaller period of time (or to the level of an individual meal itself) in order to adjust your intake to hit your target macros for the goal time period. If there are 15 days left in your goal time period and you have x calories left to consume to hit your macro target, then you must find a way to distribute those x calories over the 15 remaining days. However you partition the remaining calories, you must refer to a period of time (or to the number of remaining meals) smaller than that of the target period.

Also, unless you were lucky enough to choose and implement a near-optimal diet, you will want to adjust your caloric intake and/or macro distribution during the goal time period if you aren't making reasonable progress towards your goal. Regardless if it is total calories or macro distribution, you must refer to a smaller period of time (or to the meal itself) to make the needed adjustments.

I'll set the goal time period as the largest unit of measurement for targeting macro consumption and an individual gram as the smallest unit of measurement for targeting macro consumption--everything else is included in this spectrum. Talking about anything longer than the goal time period or anything less than a gram is essentially meaningless.

Again, if you choose to use longer periods of time for targeting macro consumption, you must refer to smaller periods of time or smaller units of measurement in order to reach your goals. You can talk about "macros for the year" as much as you like, but when implementing the diet you will need to break the year down into months, fortnights, weeks, days, meals, lbs, sips or bites, or grams, there is no getting around this (you can use any arbitrary unit you want 1.5 days, 3 weeks, etc but it will be the same).

What happens if you plan at the level of the gram? Besides being nearly impossible to carry out, you will risk driving yourself crazy. Same goes for the bite or the sip. In any event, if you analyze macronutrient targets at the level of the gram, then you must refer back to a period of time to implement your gram-based planning. If you decide you need 45,000 g of carbs for a 3 month mass gaining-phase, then you must refer to periods of time (or individual meals) to distribute these grams. Same thing goes for bites and sips.

What happens if you plan at the level of the individual meal? Based on the wording of your initial question, you would have to ask yourself if your macros for the meal fit within your macros for the meal. Well, how did you determine your macros for the meal in the first place? You determined your macros for the meal by dividing your goal time period macro targets by the number of meals in the goal time period. You had to refer to another unit to determine your per-meal macro targets.

So, larger periods of time aren't useful for implementation of macro targeting independent of, or without reference to, smaller periods of time or smaller units of measurement. And, smaller periods of time or units of measurement aren't useful independent of, or without reference to, larger periods of time.

However you decide to "hit your macros" make sure to begin with a specific goal. Use the specific goal to choose a diet. Then use the diet to help you determine your macro targets. Divide those macros up however you see fit, making sure that your method enables you to track your progress and adjust as needed.

What about diets with nonlinear intake? Cyclical diets, by their nature, allow for easy organization of macro intake. Use one cycle as the primary organizational unit, then distribute the macros to the smaller units of the cycle as required by the diet. High-carb days require more carbs than low-carb days, etc. This holds for carb-cycling, cyclical ketogenic diet, etc.

In some diets, small-scale macro distribution is determined by your training program. More carbs/calories on training days than non-training days. This is true for the targeted ketogenic diet and other non-linear diets.

What about intermittent fasting? Depending on the specific IF diet that you choose, the cycle or the day will determine macro targets.

As a practical matter, what is apparently obvious but for some reason has remained hidden to me up until now, the day is the best tool for macro distribution because most diets are organized around the day. Most people who follow a specific diet are trying to hit daily macro targets because thats how the diet is laid out.

As far as your question about eating for 5 days and then starving yourself for two, research, and the results that people have gotten from IF, have shown that it is not necessary to spread your daily macros over 5-6 meals each day, that what matters, for purposes of body composition, is that you hit your macros at the end of the day.

"Why wouldn't your body build / break muscle / fat on a meal to meal basis?" It just doesn't work that way. The processes involved in muscle and fat building and breakdown can be measured on a meal-to-meal basis, but it does not follow that each individual meal causes these processes to begin or end, speed up or slow down. Whether or not muscle is being built or fat is being lost depends on a whole host of factors that have little to do with the macronutrient composition of an individual meal. The cumulative effect of individual meals over time carries greater weight, but there are still other important factors to consider.

Factors that you can control such as training intensity, frequency, volume, cardio and other exercise. Recovery, sleep, hydration, dietary adherence. Other factors over which you have little or no control: stress, illness, injury, your age, your gender, the time of day, the time of the month, your training age.

All of these factors (and probably others that I missed) when taken together determine whether or not, at any instant in time or over any given period of time, the net effect of the relevant processes in your body is building or breaking muscle or fat.

Very informative. Repped.

[mc4_a]

Well said.

[dimasso69]

i just learned a damn lot..would rep but i got you on spread signiture..great post though i think that answers anything i wouldve asked about this, because ive been interested about this also.

[Moorhuhn]

I am wondering if statement "as long as it fits in your macros" also refers to fruit consumption since it refills liver glycogen mostly? I read somewhere that liver glycogen can store around 100g of carbs only. Would it be ok to eat 450g of raisins, which gives around 350g of carbs (140g is fructose), if it fits in your macros or you would gain fat?

[rpdm]

> I am wondering if statement "as long as it fits in your macros" also
> refers to fruit consumption since it refills liver glycogen mostly?
I fail to see how something with non-zero macros should be excluded from your total macros. That's like saying calories don't count when it's a convenient time to binge.

[Moorhuhn]

I am not saying that it should be excluded. I am just wondering what happens with excess fructose when liver glycogen is full assuming that the only carb source is fruit (in my case 450g of raisins)?

[EmperorRyker]

I am wondering if statement "as long as it fits in your macros" also refers to fruit consumption since it refills liver glycogen mostly? I read somewhere that liver glycogen can store around 100g of carbs only. Would it be ok to eat 450g of raisins, which gives around 350g of carbs (140g is fructose), if it fits in your macros or you would gain fat?If that fructose didn't go towards the body's imminent energy needs, it would get converted to fat, just like other stuff does on a constant basis. But that doesn't undermine overall validity of the calories in vs. calories out equation for net weight/fat gain. That's the whole point of looking at it from a broader perspective. If something gets stored as fat now, but at the end of the "day" you're still below maintenance, then that just means you will use up some of your fat stores from before.

[whine]

As a former fat boy I have had very bad experiences with diets that have 30% or more carbs, and taking the carbs late at night, even if they fit my macros. Basically I just feel bad the next morning if I eat a lof ot carbs late at night.

I truly believe in the "magic" of nutrition timing and eventhough I have come to the point where I dont care about every little calorie here and there I still try to keep it simple by eating my carbs around the workout.

Again, did I contrinute anything? I think not but just my 2 cents.