How Do I Know If My Macros are Right for Me?

There are so many sites and apps to calculate your macros… I’ve tried several and they all give something different! I’m 47, 5’5 and 163 pounds…I workout 5/6 times a week and pretty active… should I add I think I’m pre-menopausal😩 My goal is to be 145 to 150 range

  1. find your maintenance calories.
  2. reduce that number by 500.
  3. set your Protein to 1g/lb BW, Fats to 0.3g/lb BW, and Carbs to fill the rest.

Consider having your hormones and bone density checked. Hormones for obvious hormone reasons (they can also be adjusted to help you feel better) and bone density because it’s helpful to monitor bone loss. If i were to pick one of those two to check, it would be hormones.

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To give some detail here, my favorite method is to record everything you eat and your average weight over a week. If you stayed the same weight, that’s your maintenance. If you gained or lost, obviously that’s either side of maintenance.

Then make 10% adjustments per week. So if you had 2000 calories and your average weight stayed the same (so you’re eating at maintenance), you’d drop to 1800 (assuming your goal is losing).

The macro rules above are a great starting point.

Now that I’ve vomited, let’s call in the absolute expert @QuadQueen (especially since you have some additional considerations)!

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Heya,

I won’t add to the advice given here as far as the specifics you wanted, and hopefully quadqueen can come in and give her take (not to belay the others).

I will encourage you to visit a hormone doctor (a real modern one, who is progressive), my wife did so a decade ago, and it dramatically changed her/our life, after suffering through menopausal symptoms, which caused innumerable problems.

Cannot stress enough how truly it changed things in so many ways.

Take care.

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Okay, so I completely agree with @TrainForPain, you need to base your daily calories on what you’re currently eating. In terms of macros - I would need to see where you’re at now in order to tell you what to increase/decrease. I’d also need to know some of your weight history and what you have/haven’t tried in terms of diet approaches.

Calculators aren’t all that awesome - they can be a starting point in some cases, but I’ve found that in most instances, in order to dial things in and get results we need a good history and picture of where you’ve been and where you’re at dietarily. There’s no cookie cutter solution that can be applied across the board. If you can provide us with some more info, I can give you better guidance, but menopause can be tough and it may take some real dialing in to find the sweet spot for you.

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