What macros are
Macronutrients — protein, carbohydrate and fat — are where your calories come from. Each gram carries a fixed energy value (the Atwater factors used on every food label):
"Counting macros" simply means hitting a daily gram target for each one instead of tracking calories alone. Same math, more control: two 2,000-kcal days can look completely different — one keeps your muscle and training quality, the other doesn't — and the difference is almost entirely the macro split.
How we set your split
There are no magic ratios. This calculator uses the same order of operations a good coach does — protein first, a fat floor, carbs fill the rest:
Protein comes first because it protects muscle in a deficit and builds it in a surplus, and because it's the macro people under-eat by default. Fat gets a fixed 25% of calories — comfortably above the ~20% floor needed for hormone health. Carbs take whatever is left, which is deliberate: they're your most flexible fuel, and they scale naturally with how many calories you have to spend.
Your calorie number itself comes from the Mifflin-St Jeor BMR equation times an activity multiplier, then adjusted for goal: −20% for fat loss, +10% for a lean gain. If you already have a target from our calorie calculator — or from real-world tracking, which is better — type it into the override field and the tool uses it directly.
Adjusting to preference
Low-carb versus high-carb is a preference question, not a fat-loss question. Controlled studies that match calories and protein find no meaningful fat-loss difference between splits — energy balance decides the outcome. So treat the fat and carb numbers above as movable: shift 10–15% of calories from carbs to fat (or back) if that's how you prefer to eat. Keep protein where it is. The best split is the one you'll still be following in March.
One guardrail: don't push fat below roughly 0.5 g per kg of bodyweight for long stretches. And if you train hard, be honest that very-low-carb makes high-volume sessions feel worse — most lifters perform better keeping carbs around training days.
Hitting macros in real life
The spreadsheet part takes ten seconds; the eating part is the actual job. A food scale for two weeks teaches you portion sizes faster than any app. Repeat breakfasts and lunches so most of your day is pre-solved, then flex dinner. And aim for ±5–10 g on each macro, not perfection — label error is bigger than that anyway.
This is exactly the grind the CoachRight client app was built to shrink: clients log food in seconds with AI nutrition-label scanning, and their coach sees protein and calories live — so drift gets corrected in days, not at the next monthly check-in. If you coach people for a living, start a free 14-day trial and set macro targets for every client from one dashboard. Not sure how many calories to start from? Run the protein calculator for a deeper look at your most important macro.