The Right Amount Of Carbs For Weight Loss

Photo by Grant Cochrane
Photo by Grant Cochrane

One of the biggest misconceptions about becoming more lean is that you have to exercise more.

Many of us have heard the phrase “Your diet makes up 80% of your results” but still many people ignore this and decide to spend more time in the gym.

Not only is more exercise NOT necessary but more exercise can make it harder to lose weight.

If you want to become more lean the better way to go is to dial in on your “Macros” or Macro-Nutrients.

What Are Macro-Nutrients?

The 3 Main Macro-Nutrients are Protein, Fat and Carbohydrate and ALL of them are required for the human body to function properly.

The trick is to consume the right “types” and the right “amount” of each one to achieve your ideal amount of fat and muscle.

The Trick To Weight Loss

Since most of us have at least a little extra weight, I want to focus on specifically how to dial in the macro-nutrients to achieve weight loss.

And fortunately for us, Mark Sisson from MarksDailyApple has already done the hard work of figuring this out for us in this comprehensive article!

I’ll save you some time and get right to the important Weight Loss stuff.

For Weight Loss, you really want to focus on your Carbohydrate intake.

So how many Carbs are ideal to achieve weight loss?

Below is the info direct from MarksDailyApple.com which gives us the parameters for Carbohydrate intake:

0-50 grams per day: Easy, effortless weight loss for any and everyone. Diabetics and the severely obese may find it useful to remain in this zone, while others might employ it now and then to jumpstart weight loss or break a plateau.

50-100 grams per day: Steady, gradual weight loss. This is the sweet spot, in my opinion. You can still enjoy a wide variety of foods and lose weight slowly but surely.

100-150 grams per day: If you just want to maintain, I recommend this level. Hardcore athletes may want to increase them a bit, but your average Primal exerciser and eater will maintain supreme leanness, health, and performance at 100-150 grams per day.

150-300 grams per day: Steady, insidious weight gain. It’ll creep up on you. Just look around next time you’re at a high school reunion – people gain weight at this level without even realizing it.

300+ grams per day: Unless you’re an extreme endurance athlete, 300+ grams of carbs per day will inevitably show on your waistline. Tragically, the average “healthy” American diet reaches this carb count pretty consistently.

So as you can see, we want to keep our Carbohydrate intake to under 100 grams per day (on average) if we want to lose weight (fat and excess water).

How To Track Your Carbs For Weight Loss

OK so keeping our Carbs to 100 grams or less per day (on average) will lead to weight loss.

So how exactly do we figure out what to eat each to stay under 100 grams?

In my next article I’ll show you specifically how to track your Carbs quickly and easily using a free online tool.

1 thought on “The Right Amount Of Carbs For Weight Loss”

  1. Pingback: How To Track Carbs With MyFitnessPal

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