I'm having trouble knowing what is "alot" of calories, protein, fiber, etc. for one serving of anything to contain. I know they differ with portion and type of food, but I need to know when a food contains too many calories or contains a good amount of protein/fiber, etc.
Actually, you first start with trying to figure out how many calories you should be taking in a day. Trying to come up with this number depends on your fitness goals, your age, sex, your physical stats ( i.e like the amount of fat you have on your body ) etc. etc. There are a bunch of threads on this site that have calculators to help you do this. For arguments sake, lets say you have figured out that you need 2,000 calories a day to meet whatever your goal might be.
The next step has to do with macronutrients- carbohydrates, protien and fat. There are dozens of experts who have their own opinion as to how much of these 3 you should be taking in each day to make up your total of 2,000 calories ( BTW- protien and carbs are 4 calories each per gram - fat is 9 calories per gram ) It is often expressed in terms of a percentage ratio of the 3 - something like 33-33-33 or 65-20-15 or 40-30-30 etc. etc. etc. - and each one is the best depending on who is giving you the advice.
Assume for arguments sake you think you need your 2,000 calories to have a carbs, protien and fat a ratio of 40-30-30.
What you would try and do is allocate your 2,000 calories across all your meals & snacks for the day. Most people will tell you to try and have about 6 meals a day. So, you want to try and figure out how many grams of carbs, protein and fat you should have in each meal ( this is in an ideal world mind you - usually it is tuf to do this for each meal in real life
) You would calculate it as.....
Total calories per day X nutrient ratio divided by calories per gram divided by meals per day = grams per meal.
So, for example,
Carbs:
2,000 X .40 divided by 4 divided by 6 = 33 grams of carbs per meal
Protien :
2,000 X .30 divided by 4 divided by 6 = 25 grams of protien per meal
Fat:
2,000 X.30 divided by 9 divided by 6 = 11 grams of fat per meal
Now, the idea is that this sort of calc is only a guideline to help you figure out
if you are getting too much or too little of any of the big 3 - which is what i think you were asking about. You can vary with it meal to meal but it does allow you to determine if you are in the ballpark from a meal perspective instead of from an individual food item perspective...so in other words, each food item may not fit the exact 40-30-30 profile, and each meal may not either, but it might be the case that the collection of 6 meals may do just that by the end of the day.
