In the last few articles in this series, we have discussed a lot about diet quantity, and I want this article to serve as a kind of overview of diet quantity. This will allow you to quickly reference back to the most important information, without having to go through the more in-depth articles every time.
I have also included a few further thoughts on diet quantity, that don’t neatly fit into the rest of the articles, but will help you to better understand diet quantity and how to actually set up and follow a healthy diet.
Before we get stuck in, I would just like to remind you that we offer comprehensive online coaching. So if you need help with your own exercise program or nutrition, don’t hesitate to reach out. If you are a coach (or aspiring coach) and want to learn how to coach nutrition, then consider signing up to our Nutrition Coach Certification course. We do also have an exercise program design course in the works, if you are a coach who wants to learn more about effective program design and how to coach it. We do have other courses available too.
Table of Contents
Diet Quantity: Calories and Macronutrients Summary
We have covered a lot in this article series on setting up the diet. So far in the article series, we have discussed setting up the calories for the diet, how much protein should you eat, how much fat should you eat, how much carbohydrate you should eat, how much fibre you should eat, how much water you should drink and dealing with alcohol in the diet.
Theres a lot in there, and I am confident that if you read through those article, you will have a fairly comprehensive understanding of nutrition. However, I also know that you want somewhere to quickly reference back to just the most important points.
So let’s just quickly recap things. When we are discussing diet quantity, the targets are as follows:
- Calories: Set appropriately based on your goals (deficit, surplus, maintenance).
- Protein: Aim for 1.8-2.2g per kg of protein per day, spread out across the day relatively evenly.
- Fat: Aim for 0.8-1g per kg of fats per day, with 1-5g of EPA/DHA per day, and less than 10% of total calories as saturated fat.
- Carbs: The rest of your available calories after you have set your protein and fat targets should be allotted to carbohydrates. Carbohydrate intake should preferentially be obtained from complex carbohydrates rather than simple carbohydrates.
- Fibre: Set your fibre target somewhere in the range of 10-15g per 1000 calories.
- Water: Consume somewhere around 40mL of water per kg or 1.5mL of water per calorie, and refine this intake and distribution so that you are urinating relatively clear ~5+ times per day.
- Alcohol: Ideally, consume zero alcohol, but if you must consume it, aim to consume less than 14 units of alcohol per week, spread out over at least 3 non-consecutive days. Account for the calories of the drinks you consume, substituting out fats and/or carbs to allow for the alcohol intake.
There are obviously caveats and further refinements, but that is what the in-depth articles are for. This is just the key information, refined down as simple as I can make it while still allowing you to actually design an effective diet.
You can use our diet set up calculator or our calorie and macronutrient calculator to help you to calculate your targets for you.
Now, we didn’t discuss this too much (although we touched on it while discussing metabolism), but it also makes sense to try and somewhat standardise your non-exercise activity thermogenesis (NEAT). To do this, we generally just set a daily step count target.
While the figure of 10,000 steps per day gets thrown around a lot, it doesn’t actually need to be this number, and we really just want to try and standardise things to some extent. So a daily step count somewhere in the range of 5,000 to 15,000 steps per day is a good idea.
Pick a number that makes sense to you and your life situation, and try to stay relatively consistent with it.
You can set a weekly target, however, very often people will then remain very inactive Monday to Friday and they try to get 50,000 steps (or whatever ridiculously high number) over the course of the weekend. This is usually very hard to do, and it likely will leave you very fatigued. So while you can set a weekly target, we do still want to relatively evenly spread our step count out across the week.
Diet Priorities
That’s how you set up a diet, from a diet quantity perspective at least. There is more to the diet than purely diet quantity, but we will cover that in further articles.
The beauty of these diet quantity targets is in their simplicity, the hard work is in the actual implementation.
Be under no delusion, dietary adherence can be very hard for some people and there may be numerous barriers in the way of you even being able to eat in alignment with these targets.
Ensuring adherence and actual calorie tracking methods are as accurate as possible is tough, and you should expect that there are going to be many ups and downs along the way. Just because you know what your targets should be, doesn’t mean you will actually be able to consistently achieve them.
One way we have found to really help with this is knowing what your priorities are with the diet itself. If you know what is more important, you can at least focus on the more important things, even if you can’t get everything “perfect”.
In terms of the diet itself, the order of priorities are:
- Calories
- Protein
- Energy substrates (carbs and fats)
- Other recommendations
So the most important thing is to consume a calorie-appropriate diet. Even if the rest of the diet is a bit all over the place, if you consume the right amount of calories, you will usually be able to still move towards your health, body composition and performance goals.
After that, protein intake is the next most important thing. If you can get your protein intake where it needs to be, then this usually has a very positive impact on your diet overall. It also usually allows you to really progress nicely towards your health, body composition and performance goals. If all you did was set a calorie target and a protein target, you would actually get incredibly far with your diet.
After that, carbs and fats are pretty equal. While we have given specific targets for both, you can actually get away with quite a range with intake. Higher and lower fat/carb intakes can work.
While we think the targets we have outlined make the most sense for the vast majority of people, as long as you stay within your calories and hit your protein target, you do actually have a good bit of leeway with carbs/fats.
If you are trying to optimise things, then obviously you are going to have to be closer to optimal intakes, however, if you just want to eat a “good enough” diet, then you do have quite a bit of wiggle room.
After that, the other various recommendations are the priority. Saturated fat intake is one that I would personally prioritise, as heart disease is one of the biggest threats to your life, but if you follow good food selection practices (outlined in further articles in this series), this does actually look after itself quite easily. Omega-3 intake is also relatively easily looked after with good food practices, as is fibre intake, so you can prioritise them less.
Of course, the ideal would be to prioritise everything, but this can be overwhelming at first, and in reality, nobody ever gets the diet perfect anyway. But if you can get your calories dialled in, and then eat enough protein, you will usually have put yourself in a really good position with the diet.
For certain populations or goals, this order of importance may be changed (for example, someone at a high risk of heart disease may need to put a bigger priority on lowering saturated fat and salt intake than someone looking to lose a few kilos), but this generally holds true as a baseline order of importance.
Ranges vs. Set Targets
Another thing that can make the diet much easier is to realise that there is actually quite a lot of leeway with the numbers. As you can see, with all our recommendations, there is actually a broad range of what you could actually set your macronutrient targets as.
There are minimum numbers, more optimal numbers and then higher numbers. As long as your minimum targets are met you will have a better diet setup than the vast majority of people.
Of course, you may want to really try to nail optimal, and you can aim for those numbers then.
Perhaps you just really like a certain macronutrient, and as a result, you may want to consume a bit more of that macronutrient, even if it means you get to eat less of another one as a result.
So what we very often suggest is having a rough range for your macronutrient intakes.
Know what the bare minimum is, and know where the more optimal number is. Some days you will be more dialled in, and other days will be more of a struggle. But in general, unless you are trying to get super lean under a certain time constraint (like a bodybuilding competition or photoshoot) or you are an athlete trying to milk every last improvement you can possibly get from the diet, shooting for macronutrient ranges is actually much better than aiming for an absolute fixed macronutrient target.
So for example using that theoretical 70kg person with a maintenance of 2000 calories, protein would be set at a range of 126-154 per day and then we can play around a little bit more with the fat and carbohydrate ranges. We could easily set the range of fats to 56-70g per day and then we would just eat the rest as carbohydrates.
Alternatively, you could set a carb minimum and then eat fats and carbs to fulfil whatever calories remain. If you eat more carbohydrates than your macronutrient targets dictate, you can simply lower your fat intake to compensate, and vice versa.
There is a lot of flexibility in this. However, what can very often happen is that when people use ranges, they find themselves under-consuming protein or not staying within their calorie target.
So if we are going to use ranges, we have to still keep the priorities of the diet in mind and we still need to have some structure to the diet.
If you are constantly missing your targets because you are using ranges, you need to rethink whether your targets are manageable. You also need to assess whether you are actually planning your diet out accordingly and not just “winging it” and hoping you hit your targets by the end of the day.
This very often happens, and you will see people try to consume their entire protein target at the end of the day, as they have simply not prioritised it during the day. This rarely works.
How Dialled In With The Targets Do You Have To Be?
I should also mention that you don’t always need to be perfect with your targets. There is some degree of wiggle room built into the system, and humans are survival machines.
So don’t get too caught up in trying to be perfect with the numbers, even if you are someone trying to be more optimised with your diet.
“In and around” is generally good enough, once you stay roughly within your calorie and protein targets.
Keep the order of priorities in mind, and try to come close to your targets, but don’t sweat it if you are slightly out.
Now, if you are consistently not hitting your targets, especially if it is always below or above, then you may need to reassess either the targets or the way you are trying to actually implement the diet.
But in most cases, once you follow generally sound diet practices, being in and around the targets should be good enough.
Individual Differences
It is also important to note that there is still a lot of individual difference that needs to be taken into account with the diet.
Some people feel fuller for longer with a higher fat intake, while others feel fuller with a higher carbohydrate intake. Protein is generally the most satiating of all the macronutrients. However, you have to take into account the subtle nuances of how your diet affects you as an individual.
So after setting initial numbers, you must constantly assess how eating meals to achieve these numbers actually affects you.
Perhaps you notice that eating carbohydrates for breakfast leaves you feeling tired and groggy for the rest of the day, or you experience that post-lunch slump when you eat a certain meal composition. Well, we need to reevaluate that meal.
The numbers may fit your overall day, but this must take into account how that meal breakdown affects your performance. So if you notice eating carbohydrates earlier in the day leaves you feeling lower in energy, then you can either adjust your intake to a higher fat intake, or you can move more of your carbs to later in the day.
Those of you with higher activity levels (you have a more physical job, you walk a lot, etc.) will likely find yourself performing better with a higher carbohydrate intake, while those who are more sedentary may find that a higher fat intake suits you better.
However, probably the biggest factor that affects the individuality of your diet, is preference. Adherence is the most important part of actually achieving the results you desire, so if you can’t sustain the numbers that you have chosen because it stops you from eating the foods you prefer, then you won’t be able to adhere long term.
If you prefer eating foods that are higher in fat, set your fat intake higher and set carbohydrates lower, and vice versa.
It doesn’t have to be an all-the-time thing either. If you notice that you do actually perform better with a higher carbohydrate, lower fat diet, but you have a hot date and they want to go get a meal that is going to be higher in fat and lower in carbohydrates, adjust your number for that day. Long-term adherence is more important than transient dietary “perfection”.
Making Adjustments
There will come a time, even if you set the diet up “perfectly” to start with, when you will need to adjust the diet. This could be because results are as predicted, or have slowed, your circumstances or goals have changed or a variety of other reasons. So how do we adjust the diet?
The main variable to adjust, for most goals, is calories. When we make calorie changes, we generally want to make small changes, rather than large changes. Unless you have drastically changed your activity habits, and now need a lot more food to even maintain your body weight, more often than not, we are only going to make calorie changes in the order of 200-500 calories.
If weight loss/gain has stalled, for example, we might adjust calories by ~300 calories and then wait and see how the body responds.
Generally, we will also wait at least 2-3 weeks to allow the dietary changes to actually manifest in bodily changes. It is very rare that you would need to make drastic calorie changes, and it would be even rarer that you would need to make drastic calorie changes on a very frequent basis.
If things are moving in the right direction at an acceptable rate, you don’t need to make changes.
Now, what macronutrients would you adjust to make these calorie changes? We will generally keep protein intake fairly stable, and any changes will generally come from fat or carbs.
If fat loss is the goal, for most people, it is easiest to change fat intake first and foremost. This way you keep carbs higher, and thus reduce muscle loss and keep performance high.
When trying to lose fat, we will generally reduce fat intake, as dictated by the calorie reductions. So if you were dropping 200 calories, we would reduce fat intake by ~22g. However, we generally would move to carbs for any calorie reductions once fat intake reached the bottom end of the threshold (<0.6g of fat per kg).
Conversely, if you were trying to gain weight, we would prioritise calorie increases from fat until you were at least consuming ~0.8g per kg. Once you are consuming that much, we would generally prioritise any additional calories to be increased via carb intake.
In practice, it is rare that you would just change only one macronutrient, and it will generally be a mix of carbs and fats. This is in accordance with the priorities of the diet, and once you are at least consuming the minimum intake recommendations for fat, you do have quite a lot of wiggle room.
However, it should be noted that for most athletic, performance and muscle gain goals, carbs are likely going to be the biggest bang for your buck macronutrient (assuming protein requirements are met).
Closing Thoughts on Diet Quantity
So there you have it, a nice and neat outline of how the diet quantity aspect of nutrition. It is straightforward enough, at least in theory. In practice, it can be quite difficult to implement.
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Paddy Farrell
Hey, I'm Paddy!
I am a coach who loves to help people master their health and fitness. I am a personal trainer, strength and conditioning coach, and I have a degree in Biochemistry and Biomolecular Science. I have been coaching people for over 10 years now.
When I grew up, you couldn't find great health and fitness information, and you still can't really. So my content aims to solve that!
I enjoy training in the gym, doing martial arts and hiking in the mountains (around Europe, mainly). I am also an avid reader of history, politics and science. When I am not in the mountains, exercising or reading, you will likely find me in a museum.