Fat and Protein Macros: A 14-Second Clip That Never Became a Video
This one is short, and I'll be honest about what it is. It's a 14-second clip from July 2017, filed in a "to be reviewed" folder, recorded a few days before my first YouTube uploads. It's the opening of a video I never finished, not a lesson.
In this recording
- [0:00] There's a lot of confusion about fat and protein macros, and I want to cut to the bottom of it. Those percentages change a lot depending on how much you actually eat in a day.
That's the whole clip.
Why the one line still matters
The line holds up. A macro percentage is a fraction of whatever you ate, so the same plate gives you a different "percent fat" on a 1,200-calorie day than on a 2,000-calorie day. If your protein is a fixed number of grams and you eat less food overall, protein's share goes up even though you ate exactly the same amount of it. Chasing a percentage makes people add fat to "fix" a ratio.
I didn't finish that video in 2017, but I made the point many times later. The clearest version is the December 2019 reboot video (live PWNM7222), where I said we don't do percentages; we do whole numbers. Protein is a fixed gram target by sex, height and activity, carbs stay low, and fat is the flexible part you raise or lower by phase. The August 2017 Eating Too Much Fat video covers the other half: when weight loss stalls, the calories to drop are fat.
For context on the protein side, the evidence page gives the US adult RDA as 0.80 g/kg/day (National Academies, 2005). That's grams per kilogram, not a percentage, which is the same logic as the clip. A gram target follows your body; a percentage follows your plate, and your plate changes every day.
Key points
- This is a 14-second unfinished clip, not a full video.
- Macro percentages shift with how much you eat; grams don't.
- Set protein in grams, keep carbs low, and treat fat as the flexible macro.