“I eat intuitively, so there’s no need to track my foods.”

“I barely eat one meal a day and I’m still gaining weight.”

“I eat healthy already so I don’t understand why I can’t lose weight or build muscle.”

“I’m never hungry, I could never eat that much!”

I’m sure you’ve said or thought something similar at one point or another. The long story short: too few calories is just as bad as too many, and if you want real success, you have to track your macros (which also tracks your calories).

To understand why, we have to go back to the basics.

Everyone has a BMR (Basal Metabolic Rate). This is the amount of calories your body needs just to “keep the lights on”—breathing, circulating blood, digestion, etc. It doesn’t include daily life. It takes energy to get dressed, work, train, and just exist day to day. For most people, BMR might sit around 1500–1800, but it can be higher or lower.

Then we have TDEE (Total Daily Energy Expenditure):

BMR + daily movement + digestion + exercise.

This number is higher than your BMR and is what actually matters. If you want to lose weight, you eat below it. If you want to gain, you eat above it.

Most diet phases (below TDEE) last about 12–20 weeks. After that, we reverse calories back up to maintenance (your TDEE). This helps your body return to a healthy homeostasis—your hormones rebalance, energy and strength come back, recovery improves, and your metabolism increases.

Now let’s talk about what happens when you stay FAR below your TDEE for too long.

At first, it works… until it doesn’t. You stall. So you cut more calories, add more cardio, and push harder. It works a little, then stalls again. Repeat this long enough and you end up barely eating, not hungry, exhausted, and somehow not losing weight—or even gaining.

Your body isn’t getting what it needs, so it starts pulling from muscle (because muscle is expensive to maintain), and stores what little you eat as fat.

So where do you go from here?

The only way you can go is back up.

Yes, adding calories. Slowly. While tracking. Until you get back to maintenance.

This is where a lot of people actually see amazing body recomposition. As calories come up, protein increases, muscle builds, stored fat starts to come off, and metabolism improves. Eventually, you can diet again—but not at the extremely low calories you were stuck in before. This process takes months, not weeks.

On the flip side, eating above your TDEE long term isn’t great either. If you’re not using the energy coming in, it gets stored as fat. Over time, this can impact hormones and lead to insulin resistance, making fat loss even harder. When insulin is constantly elevated, your body is in storage mode—not fat-burning mode.

You can eat “healthy” in both situations and still be over- or under-eating. That’s the problem—without tracking, it’s all guesswork.

Tracking macros removes that guesswork. It allows you to stay at, below, or above your TDEE with intention, while making sure you’re getting the right balance of protein, carbs, and fats. You need protein to build and retain muscle, carbs for energy (based on your activity), and fats for hormone health. Too much or too little of any of these for too long can throw everything off.

Diet is different for everyone, and sometimes it takes a hot minute to really see what your body needs. But at the end of the day, it always comes down to how your body uses energy.

Once you understand that, it all starts to click and gets a whole lot easier.

So let’s track those macros and hit those nutrition goals.

Stay Strong. Stay Hungry.

~ Coach Ame