Quality of food matters, so does quantity of food. Quality of food matters because of their health benefits or lack thereof. At Granite State Kettlebells we like to use the Warrior 20 to help us keep our choices to quality foods.
Quantity of food is important to make sure we reach our goals e.g. weight loss, weight gain etc. One of the problems with the quantity part of nutrition is how do I know how much to eat? Well, one really neat way to do it is to find out how many macronutrients we should be eating each day.
We have three macronutrients we’ll be measuring, protein, carbohydrate, and fat. I'm going to assume we’re keeping our food choices within the Warrior 20(but that's a conversation for another time).There are lots of online calculators and equations in textbooks that can help us figure out how much we should eat in a day.
One problem that arises is that these calorie equations/estimations can be significantly off and the equations aren't based on you. There are millions of nutritional reports based on large sample sizes, but really the only sample that matters is YOU!
Some of us also have an aversion to weighing and measuring our food, so that makes the equations kind of pointless if we don't know how much food we're eating. So, if the knowing how much we’re supposed to eat is important for reaching our goals, but we can't totally trust the caloric equations and estimations, and weighing our food is somewhere on the inconvenient to obnoxious scale then what are we to do?
USE OUR HANDS!
We have a great way to get started in figuring out how much we should be eating. We can start here and tweak as necessary. It's our hands. Here’s how it works to start figuring out how much food we need in a meal:
- For our protein intake women will generally need 1 palm sized portion, men will generally need two palm sized portions.. Palm sized meaning circumference and thickness of our palm.
- For our carbohydrate intake women will generally need one cupped hand sized portion, men will generally need two cupped hand sized portions.
- For vegetable intake women will generally need one fist sized portion and men will generally need 2 fist sized portions.
- For fat intake women will generally need 1 thumb sized portion and men will generally need 2 thumb sized portions.
One of the coolest things about this system of guiding our portion control is that it's tremendously customizable based on our individual needs and goals.
Let’s say someone adopts this way of controlling the volume of food they eat. But now they’re getting kind of hangry between meals. Our hypothetical person might need to increase one of the 3 macronutrients particularly on days they workout, so they add ½ cupped palm of carbohydrate or protein to their meals and voila, unicorns and rainbows.
So I challenge you to try to control your portions using your hands for the next 2 weeks and report back with your results!
As with everything I espouse, it’s from standing on the shoulders of giants! I learned this concept from Precision Nutrition, to see this in really cool infographic form check out their calorie control guide http://www.precisionnutrition.com/calorie-control-guide-infographic
Be Better Than Yesterday!
-Dan
P.S. If you’re ready to take on a change not only in your nutrition but in getting fit for the summer then take on the Granite State Kettlebells 30 Day Fitness Challenge! Click HERE to apply.