A 1-minute, Monday-Friday email, to help busy professionals move more, eat better, and think clearer.
Mano Minute (3/16): Calories are not a macronutrient 🍽️
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Mano Minute (3/16): Calories are not a macronutrient 🍽️ One of the most common misconceptions I hear is that calories are a macronutrient. They are not. Calories are a unit of energy. They are the measurement, not the thing being measured. Macronutrients are the three large nutrients your body needs daily: protein, carbohydrates, and dietary fat. These are the actual building blocks. Calories are just how we quantify the energy they contain. Here is the simplest way I explain it. Protein is the builder. It builds and repairs muscle, supports hormones and recovery, and keeps you full longer than anything else. It is the most thermogenic macronutrient, meaning your body burns more calories just digesting it. Target: approximately 1 gram per pound of ideal body weight. Carbohydrates are the fuel. They power your brain, your workouts, and your daily energy. The quality of the carb matters more than whether you eat them at all. Sweet potatoes, oats, rice, and fruit are not the same as candy and white bread. Dietary fat is the regulator. It supports brain health, hormone production, and nutrient absorption. Avocado, nuts, olive oil, eggs, and fatty fish are the go to sources. All three matter. Cutting any one of them entirely creates problems. The goal is not to eliminate. It is to understand what each one does and make sure you are getting enough of each. When I started thinking about food as these three categories instead of just calories, everything got simpler. I stopped stressing about numbers and started building meals that actually worked. TIP: Next time you eat a meal, try to identify the protein, the carb, and the fat on your plate. If one is missing, that is usually where the imbalance starts. |
Mano Minute
A 1-minute, Monday-Friday email, to help busy professionals move more, eat better, and think clearer.
Mano Minute (3/20): The 12 years no one talks about ⏳ The average lifespan in the United States is 76.1 years. The average healthspan is 63.7 years. That is a 12 year gap. Healthspan is the number of years you live in good health, free from chronic disease, disability, and significant decline. Lifespan is just how long you are alive. Most conversations about longevity focus on living longer. But the more important question is how you are living during those years. That 12 year difference...
Mano Minute (3/19): Your brain can only handle four habits at a time 🔄 We try to change too many things at once. New diet, new workout plan, better sleep schedule, daily journaling, less screen time. All at the same time. And by week three, most of it falls apart. Here is why. The human brain cannot sustainably stick to more than about five new habits at a time. And even five is pushing it. The more decisions you have to make each day about new behaviors, the faster your willpower runs out....
Mano Minute (3/18): What happens while you sleep 🧠 For a long time, I thought sleep was just one thing. You close your eyes, you rest, you wake up. Turns out, there is a lot more going on. Your brain cycles through distinct stages throughout the night. The two main categories are NREM and REM. NREM stands for Non Rapid Eye Movement sleep. This is where your body does its physical repair work. Tissue rebuilding, immune system strengthening, and growth hormone release all happen here. NREM...