Everyone is constantly in pursuit of healthy eating.
Unfortunately, society has structured our entire world around poor eating habits. It can be overwhelming to try and understand exactly, “what you should eat”. We’re going to reveal exactly what you should be eating in a future post, but for now, we want to discuss the harsh truth behind “If it Fits Your Macros”, which is a very common nutrition plan.
For expertise, we asked Tye Jensen, one of our resident Conquer The Body authors. Tye has an extensive medically related background in nutrition, fitness training, and the study of the biomechanics behind the human body.
The Truth About “If It Fits Your Macros” Diets
IIFYM: or in other words, how to accelerate the deterioration of your health via justification of a poor diet.
IIFYM (If It Fits Your Macros) is a diet plan based on meeting specific macromolecule (protein, carbs, fat, and fiber) requirements each day based on height, weight, exercise level and fitness goal (overall metabolic output). The macromolecules, or “macros”, are given a number of grams per day that an individual must intake.
These macromolecules are addressed in many other diet plans and many people “count their macros” in order to ensure they are meeting their nutritional needs in order to promote muscle growth and weight gain, losing weight via fat loss, or maintaining weight. Sounds like many other diet plans, right? However, the main difference is that this diet allows for any food to be eaten in any amount as long as, at the end of the day, the set number of protein, carbs, fats, and fiber are not exceeded.
Sounds like heaven, right?
Many people seem to see success when following this program simply because this dietary plan regulates the energy intake of an individual and matches it to a goal (gain/lose/maintain).
The ugly side of IIFYM involves the micronutrients and complexity of the metabolic, reparative, and disease regulation within the body.
IIFYM totally neglects vitamins, minerals, phytonutrients, antioxidants, complex vs simple carbs, different types of fats and the majority of the health promoting qualities of a healthy diet.
For instance, fat is fat in an IIFYM diet. Some IIFYM diets will set a saturated fat limit however this is not always the case. How can optimal health be obtained with no focus on obtaining essentaial fatty acids, and differentiating, to some extent, between healthful fats VS non healthful fats?
Should the entirety of the fat intake during a day come from animal sources? Should it come from hydrogenated oils, deep fried cooking, highly processed butters and oils? On most IIFYM diets these are all suitable sources of dietary fat to meet the number of fat grams a person must consume each day.
I would hope that the IIFYM creator, Dr. Joe Klemczewski, assumes that one will be judicial in terms of choosing food and attempt to live a healthy diet, which, in my opinion, would yield great success.
An IIFYM energy based dietary plan of food in conjunction with healthy dietary selections would yield promising results, however this diet plan is almost always abused.
Too often you see fitness models and high performance athletes claiming great success while still continuing to eat fast food, pop tarts, pizza and other unhealthy American foods. Why is this? It’s because these individuals are pushing their bodies to extremes each and every day and their metabolisms are so elevated that they simply incinerate anything that is put into their bodies. This means that these individuals are easily able to match the refined energy input of these poor foods simply because their energy output is so large.
This does not mean that they are healthy at a cellular level!
This is setting a poor precedent for the rest of the population attempting to get into shape, and often times these fitness pros have hidden secrets (such as eating a largely healthful diet which they do not post), supplements, and programs allowing them to reach their physiques and performance. It will be interesting to see how true IIFYM abusers fair in the future.
While this diet, solely focused on energy intake and expenditure, may provide short term weight loss and muscle building ability, it will not provide long term health and wellness. By justifying a poor diet with short term success, IIFYM dieters are plunging themselves into accelerated disease processes and long term health problems.
IIFYM, coupled with a diet focused on plant based nutrition, monitoring animal protein and fat intake, monitoring sodium, simple carbs (except post workout), cholesterol, and processed foods could result in incredible health and fitness progress.
However time and time again IIFYM is abused and is used as a justification to consume a poor quality American diet resulting in short term fitness success but long term disease and health decline.
Want to Learn Exactly “What to Eat?”
As we begin releasing our series on a healthy lifestyle, stay informed by subscribing to our “Conquer The Body” list. You’ll be notified as soon as our fitness articles are released.
Click Here to Conquer The Body.
The post The Truth About “If It Fits Your Macros” Diets appeared first on Conquer Today.