Kelsey Marksteiner: Let’s kind of walk through this together here. I did a little bit of calculation before we sat down here today, but I think it would be good for us to go through it all together as well.
Let’s say this person needs to be on a 2,000-calorie diet, just to make this easy. I’d first, in your calculator, would type in 2,000 and then multiply that by 0.7, so we’re going to get the amount of calories coming from fat, so that’s 70 percent of calories from fat. That gives us 1,400 calories. We’re going to divide that by nine because there are nine calories in a gram of fat, which gives us about 155 grams of fat per day. Now, a serving of fat is typically about 15 grams. A tablespoon of olive oil is about 15 grams of fat. Half an avocado is about 15 grams of fat. Those would be examples of servings of fat. So if you want to then divide this 155, so that’s the amount of grams of fat, by 15 because that’s a serving, you get about 10. This person needs to eat about 10 servings of fat across the course of the day. Then you can split that up however you want throughout the day. If you’re going to have three meals per day and you want to just keep all your fat in the meals, that would be like three servings of fat in a meal. Or you could have a couple of those servings during the meals and then a couple during snacks. It depends on the person, but that would be an example. Again, that serving would be about a tablespoon of any type of fat that you’re talking about. That could be lard, butter, olive oil, avocado oil—anything like that. That’s going to be one serving.
If you want to think about it a different way, like if you know your client wants to eat nuts, for example, as a good source of their fat, I’m going to type in walnuts. This is something you can do very easily in Google. Google has a great sort of ingredient or nutrient label feature now, so if you just type into Google, “walnuts, fat,” it will pop up right when you type that in, and you’ll see 52 grams total fat, walnuts, one cup. I’m going to say one ounce. An ounce of walnuts, which is about 14 halves of walnuts, is about 18 grams, so I would consider that about a serving. It’s a little bit over that 15-gram limit, but you’ll probably be under in other servings of your day, so I would consider that just one serving of walnuts. If your client wanted to have a couple servings of walnuts per day—or just nuts, in general—that would count as two to three of those 10 servings that they’re trying to aim for in the day. So there’s that.
The next thing I would do is protein. I would want this person probably at 15 percent. You don’t want to do too high in pregnancy because it just doesn’t get used, so I would say 15 percent is probably pretty average that someone would eat in pregnancy. To get that number here, let’s do 2,000 again. We’ll multiply that by 0.15. That’s 15 percent. That’s 300 calories coming from protein. We’re going to do 300 divided by four because there are four calories in a gram of protein. That gives us 75 grams of protein throughout the day that we’re aiming for. Let’s get an example here. Let’s do chicken breast, so I’m going to type in, “chicken breast, protein.” If you choose a half a breast there, you’ll see that that gives us 27 grams of protein. Generally that’s going to be, I would say, about three servings total of about half of a chicken breast or the equivalent. That’s going to give us about the 75 grams that we are looking for for the day. If they’re having a half a breast or the equivalent of that size of some other type of meat that doesn’t have a lot of fat in it, then that’s going to get you the 75 grams. If you’re doing something that has a lot more fat in it, like a fatty cut of steak, you’re going to get less protein in there and more fat, so the person could eat sort of a bigger serving of that type of meat to get the amount of protein that they’re trying to get, and they would be getting part of that fat serving from the meat as well. You have to play around with it, depending on what type of meat this person is tending to eat as well.
Then from there, that was our fat and our protein. We did 70 percent as fat, and we did 15 percent as protein. That’s 85 percent total, so we have another 15 percent coming from carbohydrate that we want to deal with here. Again, we put in 2,000. That’s the total calories. We’re going to multiply that by 0.15. Again, that’s 300 calories. Again, we’re going to divide 300 by four because there are four calories in a gram of carbohydrate, so that’s 75 again. So 75 grams of carbohydrate throughout the day. Again, let’s take an example here. We can do sweet potato, and we’ll just type in “carbs,” and that will pop up. So about one cup of cubed sweet potato is about 27 grams of carbohydrate. You can multiply that by three or about three, and that’s going to be about 75. You could just say that at each meal this person would have about a cup of cubed sweet potato, and that would give them their 75 grams of carbohydrate throughout the day. If they wanted to have some snacks that included carbohydrate, you could either take out one of the servings of carbs from one of the meals and just split that up elsewhere throughout the day. For example, let’s just see “strawberries, carbs.” A cup of strawberries is about 11 grams of carbohydrates. Again, it’s a little bit lower than that 15 gram serving that is pretty typical, but we can just say that about a cup of strawberries is a serving. So they could have a cup of strawberries as a snack and maybe do a half a cup of cubed sweet potato at the meal that they wanted to do less carbohydrate at so that they could have this carbohydrate elsewhere in the diet.
Again, you have to play around with it a little bit. It really depends on what type of foods your client tends to eat because that can change things pretty significantly, but if you wanted to give them an idea, then this is what I do. I give them a template. I would split up, for example, the 10 servings of fat that they’re supposed to have, and each of those servings is about 15 grams of fat, so I’d say on their template, you know, one tablespoon of fat equals one serving because it’s about 15 grams of fat. I would maybe just do nine just to make it easy, and they’re probably going to get one serving sort of by accident anyway, so have three servings at each meal, or give them a couple of servings at each meal and then a couple during the snacks that they’re having. Then I would give them the options of what those servings would look like. I’d say a tablespoon of olive oil, butter, lard, etc. Just give them some options to plug into that template so they know what they can have.
Then your protein, same thing, so about three servings of that equivalent of a chicken breast. Was it half a chicken breast? I don’t remember now. Whatever that was. I think it was half, the equivalent of half a chicken breast. I would guess that’s probably about three ounces of meat. Again, if you know they’re eating a lot of fatty cuts of meat, that may be a little bit different because there’s going to be less protein in there, but for most people, they’re eating chicken a fair amount and then they’re eating leaner cuts of steak. Especially if they’re eating more grass-fed stuff, it’s going to tend to be leaner anyway. So I would just say about three servings of three ounces of meat, and then, again, give them the options for that. Usually you can just say a three-ounce serving is about the size of a deck of cards so they’ll sort of know what that looks like on their plate.
Then for the carbohydrate, we had 75 grams there as well. Again, that can show up as three cup servings of cubed sweet potato throughout the day or maybe half a cup at one of those meals and a serving of strawberries at another meal. You could say, like, a cup of berries, in general, is going to be about that 15-gram carbohydrate level.
So give them the options, give them a template so that they can plug in the choices that they want. It’s never going to be perfect, but it’s going to be close enough that they get the idea, and they’re getting about the number of calories that they’re supposed to get throughout the day, and they’re getting about the macronutrient breakdown that you’re aiming for. Hopefully that makes sense.