After a long night out last night watching our local high school basketball team upset the defending state champions and break a 40 game win streak, I was exhausted. I got home around 12:15am, and had set my alarm for 7:00am.
To my surprise in the morning, I woke up on my own. At 11am!
I looked to my phone and it was in setup mode… and after further investigating I learned that my iphone decided to update itself overnight!
Cool!!!!
Not.
The worst part was, I had a personal training client at 8:00am.
Check out this text I got….
As you can see, I didn’t reply until later when I woke up…
So, I got lucky!
But I was still behind on a lot I needed to get done in the day.
I walked into the kitchen, and found one of these puppies…
Actually, I don’t have a picture because I ate them all.
But it was a Quaker Rice Cake, Chocolate Crunch!
MMM these are good. And they were quick which was just what I was looking for.
After eating about 3, and working at the same time, I started to notice very quick how it’s easy to eat a lot and not even know it.
I was working on my computer, and throwing down rice cakes…
and I didn’t even know I was doing it until about three cakes in.
So, next thing I did was look at the nutrition facts to see what I had just unintentionally eaten like a madman. And this is also where I got the idea to write this for you!
So, I ate 3 rice cakes.
If we look at the label, we can see that 1 serving is 1 cake.
There are 60 calories per serving, so that’s 180 calories total.
There was 1g of protein per serving, I had 3g of protein total, which is a total of 12 calories from protein
There was 1g of fat, and I had 3g total, so that would give me 27 fat calories. However, the label marks that there were actually 10 fat calories per serving, so I am going to use that. So I had a total of 30 fat calories.
And if there are 10 fat calories and 4 protein calories in one cake, that must mean the rest are carbohydrates.
Here’s a quick summary of my snack that I had:
- 180 total Calories
- 30 Fat Calories
- 12 Protein Calories
- 138 Carbohydrate Calories
Now, let’s look at the ratio of fat, carb, and protein I ate.
- 17% Fat
- 7% Protein
- 76% Carbohydrate
Based off of my goals (to add lean muscle mass), this is not a macro-nutrient ratio (carbohydrates, proteins, and fats) that I want to be eating in.
In order for me to build lean muscle, on lifting days I want to eat:
- 50% Carbohydrates
- 30% Protein
- 20% Fat
Let’s take a look at how I feel
It’s about 20-30 minutes after I’ve eaten these as I write this right now, and I feel a little hypoglycemic. However, I’m not really craving any foods right now. I am really craving water actually. This could be because I haven’t drank anything since I woke up today, or because of the what I ate.
Now obviously I could get way more specific with this breakdown of this food and what I ate, but I want to keep it very simple for today.
Ratios are important
It’s important that you know what ratio you want to eat your macro-nutrients in based off of your goals.
If you don’t there’s no way of knowing what types of foods to eat, and you’re basing your decisions solely off of calories.
Ratios will also help keep your blood sugar level in check, which is extremely important when it comes to losing, or gaining weight. And of course feeling good.
How do I react?
If you noticed, I haven’t called myself any bad names for eating a food that made me feel iffy…I simply have broken down, analyzed it, and determined that this moved me away from my goals of muscle building rather than moving me closer to it. I want you to try that same approach the next time you do something you don’t like.
What could I have done differently?
I could have looked in my fridge to see if there was a healthier choice that I could have made. I looked after and I found some guacamole. I could have had that with tortilla chips and based of experience I know I would feel better, that would have gotten me more calories which I should have.
What ratio is best for you?
Depending on your goal, the ratios change. I’m going to be going over this more soon in my nutrition program coming soon!
The point of this blog post was to give you an idea of how you can evaluate how you ate in particular meal. Never react emotionally and call yourself a name! Just look at it logically and figure out how eating what you did made you feel, did it move you toward your goal, and how can you improve if you didn’t.
I hope you liked this!
Hunter Grindle
