Macronutrients and your diet
TL;DR
If you're in a hurry, here is the gist:
It's not enough to just eat as much food as you spend energy. You also need to make sure that you're getting the right amount of carbs, protein and fat.
It's difficult to do this just by looking at your food, because most ingredients are providers for all three kind of macros (pasta does not consist only of carbs, it also has fat and protein in it), and because fat is much more energy-dense than carbs and protein.
Nutrfy makes it easy for you to hit your macronutrient needs because it dynamically adapts recipes for the best macronutrient split.
An Important Note on Fat
Fat is incredibly energy-dense. 1 gram of fat can provide you with twice as much energy as a gram of protein or a gram of carbohydrates.
That's one reason why just dividing your meals into three buckets, one for each macro-nutrient is not enough to make sure you hit the optimal composition of your meal.
It's tempting to think: Well, roughly half of my food should be a provider of carbs, 15% protein and the rest fat, and then go and take 100g of pasta, 30g of chicken and then another 70g of avocado.
That's too much fat, and here is why:
Fat is more calorie-dense than protein and carbohydrate. One gram of carbs or protein provide you with roughly 4 kilocalories, but one gram of fat has 9 kilocalories!
So if you create your portions like this, you actually and up with 400 kcal of carbs, 120 kcal of protein, and 630 kcal of fat.
Not only will you get your target calories wrong (you wanted to eat 800 calories, but ended up with 1.150!), but also the composition of your meal will be off: Instead of the 55/15/30 split you end up with a meal that has way too much fat in it:
|35% |Carbs | |10% |Protein| |55% |Fat|
That's why it's so difficult to get your macronutrient split right just by looking at your ingredients.
For example, 5 gram of olive oil (that is roughly a tablespoon full) has 40 kcalories, which is roughly the energy content of a tomato, which not only is xxxx gram, but also much larger.
55 * 2 * 4 440 kcal carbs = 110g 15 * 2 * 4 120 kcal protein = 30g 30 * 2 * 9 240 kcal fat = 26g