How Much of Each Nutrient Should You Be Eating?

When setting up an efficient and effective diet, you need to be clear that it's not enough to simply figure out your caloric input, but also to determine what kind of calories you should be eating. How much of your total input should be protein, how much should be carbs, how much should be fat? These questions depend on what your goals are, but if you are simply looking forward to losing weight and slimming down in a healthy manner that will burn the most fat and conserve the most lean body weight, then you need to figure out what balance of nutrients you are consuming. In today's article we're going to look at the caloric value of different nutrients and give you an idea as to how much you should consume.
First you need to determine the amount of calories you need to be consuming, and in order to do so you can simply get a general sense by multiplying your weight by somewhere between 12 to 16. The low end of the scale will fall for people who are very sedentary, while elite athletes will burn 16 or higher. If you are of moderate activity level, so working out three times per week, put yourself in the middle and go from there.
Once you know how much you need to consume to maintain your weight, you need to subtract a couple of hundred from that number and that is a healthy long term diet. Of those calories, you should first determine how many of them should be derived from protein. Protein is the most important element because it helps blunt hunger and keep your lean body mass while dieting. Somebody who has no activity should consume about 0.75 grams per pound of body weight, while somebody who is doing weights should consume about 1 to 1.25 grams per pound. Then multiply your result by 4 to get your total calories.
To figure out your carb intake you need to do a couple more steps. Simply take your weight in pounds, and then multiply it by zero if you are completely inactive, by 0.5 if you are lightly active, by 1 if you are moderately so, and by 1.25 if you are very active, and then 100 grams to the answer and that's how many grams you should be consuming.

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