third one, nearing the end of this series. also my thoughts are a bit scattered yet again so good luck. there will also be some math so stay strong lol. anyways,

we eat food every day and tend to not really think about it, but the components (parts) of food and the corresponding calories are incredibly important to how your weight loss/gain progress will turn out

i will mainly be discussing the three key components that are part of all foods. these components are known as "macronutrients" or "macros" in food and nutrition circles. i will not be discussing micronutrients because i don't really know about them lol (this doesn't mean they're not important, just that i can't talk about them properly)

these macronutrients are: protein (4 calories/gram), carbohydrates ("carbs" - and also 4 calories/gram) and fat (9 calories/gram)

all foods you eat have the potential to contain these "macros", but to different extents

some foods may be primarily carbs (like bread or most vegetables), some primarily protein (like chicken), and some primarily fat (like oils such as olive oil)

most foods, however, are not really just one category or another, but a mix of the three

adding up either the macros or just the total calories of the food you've eaten (meaning not worrying too much about macros) in the day will work for tracking overall calories and consequently for weight loss or weight gain (although proper food composition is important for proper weight loss or gain composition: check previous raffle - 4WP952 ).

so how to determine the weight of the food you've eaten? the easiest way is to use a food weighing scale

i'll explain more with an example: let's say bananas are approximately 90 calories/ 100 grams.

If i eat 50 grams of bananas (as my trusty scale will tell me), how many calories have i eaten? 45. Easy enough. But what if I ate 67 grams of the banana? A bit harder to tell, right? So you can use a calculator.

Math incoming! I'll discuss one way to avoid this after I explain how it's done.

The equation would basically be (x calories)/(67 g) = (90 cal)/(100 g) meaning that x = (90*67)/100 = 60.3 calories

Now you have multiple options: make a spreadsheet on your own (what i did), or use a free service such as myfitnesspal (aka MFP) - which is really, REALLY useful for this sort of calorie tracking and a bit more automatic (i have absolutely no affiliation, just stating a useful tool)

basically if you do this for all your food in the day, you'll have a good idea as to how many calories you've eaten

sometimes you have no choice but to approximate, and that's ok. make the best of whatever situation you're in. any calorie counting is likely going to provide superior results to none at all. for fast food, you can just google how many calories there are in what you're eating. (rest in entered message)