I noticed that no one in the IIYFM community is talking about keeping MICRONUTRIENTS in check for overall health. Are macros and calories more important than micronutrients?
Eat a healthy, varied diet.
The keto community assume you don’t just eat yoghurt every meal.
The vegan community assume you don’t just eat carrots for every meal.
The carnivore community assume you don’t just eat grass fed stea…. oh wait.
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Overall, whichever path you go, look to get a good variety within the parameters set, and if its something that restricts a certain food group then also do some quick research on what you could be deficient in and how to counter.
I’ve never heard of a person in a first world country getting a micronutrient deficiency except:
So I’d say for the vast majority of people on first world countries, the main cause of metabolic derangement comes from 1) caloric excess and 2) macronutrient derangement, not micronutrient problems. The case is different historically and elsewhere in the world.
A long time ago it was a lot more common to be deficient in certain nutrients due to a variety of reasons. However, over time we learned what nutrient deficiencies resulted in specific adverse health outcomes. In more modern times, like today, many foods are fortified and deficiencies in micronutrients aren’t very common. A caveat to this would be those with certain dietary preferences, medical conditions, food insecurity, etc.
It’s because the general idea is that yes it should fit your macros if you have a physique goal, but it’s also the concensus on the whole that most of these foods should be nutrient desnse, balanced choices (it kinda goes without saying, or should).
Flexible dieting and IIFYM are a bit different, but similar, but the idea is to stop the black and white thinking around food and stop this whole “good” foods and “bad” foods mindset and just eat well while understanding how macros can affect body composition.
A lot of people fall into this trap that they can only get lean by eating “clean” foods, which is completely bullshit.
So IIFYM was born and then flexible dieting expanded on it by having macros but saying count your macros but…hey we can be a bit more flexible here within reason and tries to get across that it’s not as many sweets and protein sources as you can possibly fit within your macros (which is kinda where some people started to go with IIFYM, particularly influencers pretending like they eat shit all day for clicks).
Some people don’t eat balanced, but those are people that weren’t before they did IIFYM anyway.
For body composition, macros are more important in terms of how they directly affect muscle and fat. Micros have an indirect effect in that if you feel like shit because you’re eating like shit then your training, might be poor, your sleep and therefore recovery poor etc etc. They’re not more important in the context of health.