Is There a Magic Macro Formula? Calories and Protein

Nikkiey: I know that you've been through it. You shared being 20 pounds underweight. You shared being 30 pounds overweight, an all-or-nothing mindset, to now finding a totally simplified approach, which has made you so much happier with your physique, your health and your mindset. So I personally want to hear more of your journey, and I know the listeners want to hear that as well. So can you take us along your journey and share with us why fitness is just so important to you?

Paula: For sure. Absolutely. I would say I got into fitness seriously when I was 20. People are always surprised to hear this: I did not play a sport growing up. I played one season of soccer when I was in middle school, and it was far too much running. I don't know why I didn't anticipate that. There was a lot of running in soccer, but I was like, well, we're done with this. So I don't really qualify that as having played a sport.

But my parents are former military. My dad always had a home gym. He always lifted. So that was what I saw growing up: lifting weights. My mom always did the at-home VHS workouts, if you remember those, like Buns of Steel, The Firm. So that was my intro when I was 16, 17.

But when I got to college, I really wanted to start lifting weights, because I would look at the pictures of Nicole Wilkins and Erin Stern and Alicia Marie and all the OGs in Oxygen Magazine and Muscle & Fitness Hers. I'd tear them out and put them up in my dorm room. I finally started learning how to lift weights. I had a guy friend of mine take me around the weight room, and that was what made me fall in love with it.

And what's so crazy is that prior to getting into fitness, I never struggled with my weight. In my teen years, I never had a hard time staying thin. I was just naturally always thin. And I remember thinking, I'm very grateful I don't have to worry about that, because I had to worry about my skin. But getting into fitness was actually what created such a poor pattern of eating for so long, because it made me obsessed with food.

I started learning to lift at 20. At 21, I hired my first personal trainer because I wanted to do a figure show. And it turns out I didn't actually want to compete in bodybuilding. I wanted to look like I did. And that's a very important distinction when people ask, oh, should I do a show? It's like, well, do you want to compete, or do you just want to look like you compete? Because you're going to have a dramatically different mental outcome if you're only getting into this because you want to look a certain way. So that was me. I didn't really care about the competition piece. I just wanted to look like that.

But with my intro into the knowledge of how to eat, I went from eating NutriGrain bars to following a contest prep diet. So I always associated that with healthy eating. I thought, oh, well, this is what I have to do to lose weight. I was so emotionally attached to this contest prep diet for years because I didn't know any other way to lose weight.

So what I fell into was this horrible cycle of restricting for weeks and months on end. Then when I would mentally break, I would binge. Then I would mentally spiral into depression. And then I would get my shit together and go back into restricting again. So that's how I ended up getting into that. I was either 20 pounds underweight or 30 pounds overweight. I didn't always shift that dramatically in my weight, but I definitely was constantly in a state of yo-yoing. I was either gaining weight or losing weight. It was one or the other. And that was my entire 20s.

I got certified as a strength coach through the Poliquin Strength Institute. If you're familiar with Charles Poliquin, he passed away a few years ago, but his strength institute was in Rhode Island. I got certified there after I graduated, because I have a degree in art. I studied art in school, but as I fell in love with lifting, I thought, well, I want to learn as much as possible, because if I can cram as much information into my brain, then maybe I'll get shredded. That was my whole knowledge base: okay, I'll just learn as much as I can.

And what's so ironic is that I was gaining all this knowledge. I had certification after certification, course after course, seminar after seminar. And I still couldn't figure out how to lose weight. I couldn't figure out how to get lean. No one ever taught me macros.

Nikkiey: That key word.

Paula: Key word. I was eating all the right foods. They say eat a handful of nuts for a snack. Eat avocado. Eat whole eggs. Cook everything in coconut oil. All of those are fats, and fats are more than twice as calorically dense as carbs. At the time, I wasn't even paying attention to that.

So I went from eating this diet plan to falling into the paleo thing. And all the while, the diet plan didn't teach me how to eat, because it's just: eat these things. It's not: here, learn what is in this. It's: go follow this plan. And then I became emotionally attached to it. After that it was paleo, because it's, oh well, as long as you eat healthy foods you don't need to worry about how much you eat, which is a lie. Because eating for health and eating for weight loss are two totally different things. They need to be blended.

But it took me until I was probably 28 years old to figure that out, when someone finally said, you just need to track your macros. All I want you to do is focus on your calories and your protein and let your carbs and fats fluctuate. And that blew my mind, because for the longest time I was so obsessive about those numbers. What's the right number of carbs? What's the right number of fats? Surely that matters. I have to make sure all the numbers are perfect. I believed there was this magical formula and I just hadn't cracked the code yet.

And lo and behold, when I started tracking my calories and protein, letting my carbs and fats fluctuate, and eating healthy food 90% of the time, it became really easy.

Nikkiey: And the results.

Paula: Oh my god. Let me tell you. I know you understand this completely, and probably a lot of listeners do as well. When you go through the wringer of trying every diet under the sun, carb cycling, diet plans, paleo, everything, and you finally hear, oh, just calories and protein.

Nikkiey: Surely that's not it.

Paula: Yeah. Surely it's more complicated. And it's really not.