My Experience with IIFYM

Losing weight and getting fit with tracking macros

Macros. If It Fits Your Macros (IIFYM). Flexible Dieting. It’s all the same idea really. I have been tracking macros since January 2016. The concept of macros came into my life after I had maintained my 85 lbs weight loss for a couple years and then started steadily gaining over the holidays in 2015. I was looking to switch things up and break myself out of the cycle I was in. Focusing on specific macro targets instead of just calories overall has changed my body composition. What I mean by that is that even though my weight loss since starting with macros may not be super drastic, my body looks very different in terms of how that weight is distributed. Case in point, the picture below. There is only about a 20 pound difference between the two but the bigger difference I notice is the change in the way my body looks.

I won’t lie, it was so difficult for me to make all the numbers fit at first. I felt like I was doing algebra all day. My carbs and fats were pretty much gone by lunch leaving me with insane amounts of protein to eat for the rest of the day. Unless I was planning on downing chicken and egg whites every night this wasn’t going to work. I learned quickly to plan my food in advance and balance out my macros so that I was getting adequate protein in throughout the day.

With macros, most things are tracked in grams so first and foremost, you’ll need a food scale to track. I got mine from amazon. And yes, you’re supposed to weigh EVERYTHING. So here is my little caveat. I will say, for some people, this method may not work for your lifestyle. If you’ve struggled with disordered eating in the past or you have obsessive tendencies, I can see how weighing everything you eat may do you more harm than good. For me, I was coming from a place where I was already tracking calories and doing so as part of my daily routine. It was an easy transition to start looking more closely at the way those calories were being divvied up. But even with that background, I have found myself frustrated and tired of counting and weighing every single thing I eat. I want to be completely honest and transparent here because it’s not always easy to constantly be consumed with the diligent tracking that IIFYM requires. I’ve heard tales of people busting out their food scales at restaurants or parties and that’s just not a place I wanted to get to mentally. I can understand if you’re prepping for a fitness competition but that’s usually not the case for most of us. Whenever I start to feel like I am going a little macro crazy, I usually take a few days off to just exist without my food scale. Then when I’m ready, I will come back to it.

Weighing my food has really helped to educate me about how much I was eating and what a serving size really looked like. Even though tracking can sometimes feel like a chore, it also showed me that I can’t eat a small handful of this or a handful of that and pretend those calories I ingested don’t exist. Everything adds up. It helped make me much more mindful when snacking.

If you’re new to macros and looking for a few ways to make it all work, here are a few tips that helped me in those beginning stages.

Here is some more info on how I meal prep!

One thing I am transitioning to is trying not to stress about the exact fat and carb counts. I have a general calorie target and I make sure to try to hit my protein goal. As long as my protein is taken care of and I am within the calorie target, I don’t stress too much anymore about the exact number of carbs and fats. It helps me uncomplicate matters a bit and works well since some days my body is craving more fats and some days I need more carbs. And if there is a day I trained extra hard and my body is telling me it’s hungrier than normal, I feed it. I only restrict myself from food when I know I’m “fake hungry”. Those are the days I’m bored, or sad or stressed. Usually, I can chug some water and the hunger will eventually dissipate. If my body is still hungry after some water and some time, then I will eat.

I do not plan on tracking macros forever. I don’t think that it’s realistic to weigh and track everything I consume for the rest of my life. I would go absolutely nuts. My goal is to reach a place where I can eat intuitively and have macro tracking in my back pocket as a tool when I want to rein in my diet a bit and tighten things up.

That pretty much sums of the basics of how I track macros. If there is anything I didn’t answer or you have other questions, add them in the comments below!

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