Why you’ll never see me just give a client 'macronutrient targets'

I've noticed a trend that hopefully dies out soon...

This is: coaches giving clients macronutrient targets - and hoping they'll just figure everything out for themselves with the help of My Fitness Pal.

Here are five reasons why I've never done this and I hope this stops happening.

1. People eat real food. Not macronutrients. Giving someone just ‘macronutrients’ to hit, when they don’t know whether there’s fat, protein or carbs in the fruit they snack on, the sandwich they have for lunch, or their favourite chocolate, isn’t empowering at all.
2. Food choice and quality simply aren’t addressed. Dietitians or coaches might think the food choices are obvious, but to the average person, it helps to be given insight into the appropriate foods to choose for their goals to simplify the process for them. Reducing anxiety around food choice = better results.
3. Giving an open-ended macronutrient target with no guidance or education is way too flexible. This means a client could choose 200g of carbs from lollies, just because it fits their day on My Fitness Pal (bad move). And on the flipside, giving numbers with no context causes unnecessary stress over the ‘right things’ to choose. This is likely to backfire in the opposite direction and clients self-impose restrictions like ‘no bread’ because they don’t know what to do. (FYI: Yes- bread is OK to have!!)
4. Distribution and timing of calories aren’t guided, so clients can end up doing wacky things like having 0 calories most of the day and then 2000 in an hour. Or 200 calories for breakfast, 300 for lunch & dinner and then 1000 calories for snacks. I’ve seen this before, and every time, it comes at the detriment of the diet quality, choices of foods and timing of nutrients.
5. Protein intake in particular, can be unbalanced (typically with backloading it all at nighttime), which has worse outcomes for gym recovery, muscle protein synthesis (aka muscle growth) and energy across the day. Looking at a number for protein and not knowing how to break it up can be daunting for a client. Providing portions of foods in the context of breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks is much more helpful.

Overall, while calorie and macronutrient targets can be useful tools to layer into nutrition guidance, these aren’t the only focus to a person's diet.

Only providing these numbers is doing the client a disservice.

Food type, quality, portion sizes, timing and distribution, are all equally as important as the macronutrients and calories and should be provided in context.