If you’ve ever wondered how many calories you should eat, how much protein you actually need, or what your ideal macros are, you’re not alone.
One of the biggest misconceptions I see in my Functional Medicine practice is women who think they’re eating enough simply because they’re “eating healthy.”
They’re choosing salads, smoothies, fruit, and low-fat foods—but they’re still exhausted, struggling to build muscle, dealing with hormone imbalances, or wondering why their metabolism feels so slow.
The truth is, healthy doesn’t always mean enough.
Here’s a conversation I have at least three times a week:
Patient: “I eat really healthy.”
Me: “Awesome. How much protein are you eating?”
Patient: “…I have no idea.”
Or I’ll ask:
“What do your macros look like?”
Patient: “My what?”
And there it is.
Because eating “healthy” and eating in a way that actually supports your hormones, metabolism, muscle, and energy are two very different things. Most women aren’t intentionally under-eating—they’re simply guessing.
That’s why I have nearly all of my patients use MyFitnessPal.
Not because I want them obsessing over calories, but because it’s one of the easiest ways to collect objective data. Think of it like a lab test for your diet. Before we can optimize your nutrition, we first need to know what you’re actually eating.
In this article, I’ll show you how I use MyFitnessPal with my patients, how to calculate the right protein, fat, and carbohydrate targets based on your goals, and why tracking your food for just a few weeks can completely change the way you eat.
Why I Recommend MyFitnessPal (And How to Actually Use It)
MyFitnessPal isn’t magic.
It’s a mirror. And like any mirror, it’s only useful if you’re willing to look at it honestly.
Here’s how I recommend patients use it:
Step 1: Track Everything for 3–5 Days Without Changing Anything
Don’t start “eating better” before you track. Log everything. The handful of almonds. The olive oil you’re using to cook in. The coffee with oat milk. The Celscius. The three bites of your kid’s mac and cheese. All of it.
Step 2: Look at Your Macro Breakdown, Not Just Calories
In the app, go to Nutrition > Macros.
You’ll see a breakdown of protein, carbohydrates, and fat as percentages. This is the number that matters. Most women I see for the first time come in with something like: 15% protein, 60% carbs, 25% fat. And they wonder why they’re tired, inflamed, and can’t lose body fat despite “eating healthy.”
Step 3: Compare to Your Target Range
More on targets below — but having a baseline first is key. You can’t adjust what you haven’t measured.
How to Set Up MyFitnessPal for This Approach
The default macro settings in MyFitnessPal are based on standard USDA guidelines, which skew carb-heavy.
Here’s how to customize them:
On the App:
Go to More > Goals > Calorie & Macronutrient Goals.
Tap on the macro percentages and adjust to your target split.
I typically start patients at 35% protein / 40% fat / 25% carbs and adjust from there based on how they feel and what their data shows.
What to Watch Each Day:
- Protein first. Did you hit your protein target? This is the non-negotiable.
- Carb quality and timing. Are your carbs coming from vegetables, legumes, and whole grains, or from processed foods and sugar?
- Fat sources. Avocado, olive oil, eggs, fatty fish, nuts — these are not the enemy. They’re the hormonal support system your body runs on.
- Total calories. Are you actually eating enough? Under-eating is just as common a problem as over-eating, especially in women who’ve been on and off restrictive diets.
So What Should Your Macros Actually Look Like?
Here’s where I’ll give you the answer and the asterisk at the same time, because anyone who gives you a one-size-fits-all macro split is selling something.
That said, the range I work from for most women is:
Protein: 30–40% of total calories
Fat: 30–40% of total calories
Carbohydrates: 20–25% of total calories
Yes, that’s lower carbs than you’ve probably been told. No, it’s not keto. It’s just a recalibration away from the carb-heavy, protein-light way most Americans eat and it makes an enormous difference for most women.
But Here’s the Asterisk: It Depends on Three Things
- Your Activity Level
If you’re training hard (lifting 4x/week, running, doing high-intensity work) you need more carbohydrates to fuel performance and recovery.
A woman doing CrossFit, Orange Theory or spin daily is not the same as a woman doing yoga twice a week and walking her dog.
Carbs are performance fuel. If you’re not performing, you don’t need as much fuel.
- Your Goals
Fat loss, muscle gain, hormone balancing, managing blood sugar, improving energy, all have slightly different macro emphases.
If fat loss is the goal, lower carbs and higher protein tends to win. If you’re building muscle, total protein grams matter more than percentage. If hormones are the issue, fat often needs to go up, not down.
- Where You Are in Your Cycle
This is the one nobody talks about enough and it’s also the one with the most interesting science behind it. Your body is not the same across all phases of your menstrual cycle, and your nutrition shouldn’t be either.
In the follicular phase (days 1–14), estrogen is rising and insulin sensitivity is generally higher. Many women feel more energetic during this time and tend to tolerate carbohydrates more efficiently.
In the luteal phase (days 15–28), progesterone becomes the dominant hormone. It also has a thermogenic effect, meaning your body burns slightly more calories at rest—roughly 100–300 extra calories per day. If you find yourself hungrier the week or two before your period, you’re not imagining it. Your body genuinely needs more energy.
So when you’re reaching for bread and chocolate at day 24, your brain is chemically requesting serotonin precursors. It’s not weakness.
Your brain is asking for a neurochemical reset, and it’s figured out that sugar is the fastest route to get it.
What this means practically: the goal in the luteal phase isn’t to eat more carbs, it’s to eat enough total calories (your needs are genuinely higher) and to satisfy the serotonin mechanism with quality sources rather than a blood sugar rollercoaster.
Think complex carbs paired with protein and fat: sweet potato hash with ground turkey and avocado, roasted carrots and beets with a hard boiled egg, or a small handful of walnuts and a square of dark chocolate after a protein-rich dinner.
You get the tryptophan pathway support without the crash that follows a bag of crackers eaten standing over the kitchen sink at 10pm. (No judgment. We’ve all been there.)
The Protein Problem: Why Almost Every Woman I See Is Under-Eating It
If I had to pick one macro that is chronically, consistently under-consumed by women, it’s protein.
And yes, protein is having a moment on social media right now and honestly, for good reason.
But the influencer version of the protein conversation leaves out some important nuance: protein quality matters, bioavailability matters, and fiber matters.
Hitting a protein number on a protein bar or shake nutrition label doesn’t automatically mean your body is absorbing and using it effectively.
Read more about that in my blog here, “Why Your Protein Shake Is Making Things Worse: The Meal Replacement Problem, Smoothie Myths, and How to Actually Use Protein Powder”.
But first, let’s establish that most women aren’t even close to hitting a reasonable target to begin with.
The average woman’s day looks something like this: coffee or a smoothie for breakfast, a salad for lunch, pasta or something similar for dinner, and a touch of ‘girl dinner’ that looks something like a handful of crackers or a protein bar somewhere in between.
That’s a high-carb, low-protein day dressed up as healthy eating, and it’s incredibly common.
The reasons are partly cultural (“protein is for bodybuilders”), partly practical (protein-rich foods require more prep than grabbing a piece of fruit), and partly because of the persistent and frankly insulting myth that eating more protein will make women “bulky.”
It won’t. What it will do is support the body systems that most women are desperately trying to fix.
Here’s what adequate protein actually does:
Supports muscle mass, which is your metabolic engine — the more muscle you have, the more calories you burn at rest and the better your body composition over time
Regulates hunger hormones like ghrelin and leptin — protein keeps you full far longer than carbohydrates, which is why a high-carb breakfast leaves you hungry two hours later
Stabilizes blood sugar, which reduces the afternoon energy crashes, cravings, and mood swings that come with carb-heavy eating
Supports hormone production, since hormones are synthesized from amino acids and cholesterol, so chronically under-eating protein is directly working against your hormonal health which so many people are trying to fix and balance these days
Maintains bone density, which becomes increasingly important as women approach perimenopause
Supports sleep, mood, and anxiety regulation, amino acids are precursors to neurotransmitters like serotonin and dopamine, so the woman who’s tired, anxious, and not sleeping well may not just need more rest. She may need more protein.
When I pull up a patient’s MyFitnessPal data and see 60–70g of protein per day, I’m not surprised when she also reports exhaustion, irregular periods, fertility struggles, poor sleep, anxiety, and a frustrating plateau despite doing “everything right.”
These aren’t separate problems. They’re often the same problem.
The general target I work with is 0.7–1g of protein per pound of body weight, depending on activity level and goals. For a 150-pound woman, that’s 105–150g of protein per day. Most women are getting half that and wondering why they feel the way they do.
The Carb Problem: Why “Healthy Carbs” Are Still Too Many Carbs for Most People
Oatmeal or sourdough toast for breakfast. A sandwich for lunch. Rice with dinner. A banana as a snack.
Sounds healthy, right?
By conventional wisdom, absolutely.
By macros? That’s a 60–70% carbohydrate diet that spikes blood sugar 4x a day and leaves almost no room for protein and fat your body actually runs on.
I’m not anti-carb. Carbohydrates are necessary and some people genuinely do well with more of them (particularly athletes, people with very high activity levels, and certain metabolic types).
But for the average sedentary-to-moderately-active woman, eating carbs (especially processed ones like bread, pasta, tortillas, muffins, etc) at every meal crowds out the protein and fat she actually needs more of.
A slice of sourdough toast and a banana aren’t “bad” foods in isolation. But if they’re sitting in a macro breakdown that’s already 60% carbohydrates with 15% protein, they’re not helping you.
Processed carbs (bread, pasta, crackers, tortillas, cereals) are calorie-dense and nutrient-poor. They take up real estate on your plate and in your macros without delivering the protein, fat, or micronutrients your body actually needs to function.
They also spike your blood sugar, which triggers an insulin response, which leads to a crash, which leads to more cravings and the cycle repeats four or five times a day without you ever feeling truly satisfied or nourished.
The whole food carb sources (sweet potatoes, root vegetables, squash) are a different story entirely.
They come with fiber, micronutrients, and compounds that slow digestion and support gut health. Your body responds to them completely differently. The problem was never carbohydrates as a category. It was the specific processed carbohydrates we were told to build our diets around.
A Quick Note on Where This Advice Came From
If you’re wondering why conventional nutrition guidance looks so different from what I just described (lower carbs, higher protein and fat, quality over quantity) the short answer is: the guidelines most of us grew up with weren’t designed purely with your health in mind.
The food pyramid, the low-fat era, the 6–11 servings of grains per day, that guidance had some significant conflicts of interest baked into it from the start.
That’s a longer conversation, and honestly it deserves its own post. Read it here: [Why the Food Pyramid Was Never Really About Your Health →]
For now, just know that the carb-heavy way most Americans were taught to eat wasn’t an accident and you don’t have to keep eating that way.
The Reframe That Actually Works
Instead of asking “is this a healthy carb?” ask: “did I already eat enough protein and fat today?”
If yes, and you want the rice, have the rice. If you’ve been grazing on crackers since 8am and your protein is sitting at 30g by 3pm, choose meat and veggies instead.
The goal isn’t to fear carbohydrates. It’s to stop letting them take up so much real estate on your plate that everything else gets squeezed out.
Protein and fat are not optional extras you add if there’s room. They’re the foundation.
Carbohydrates, particularly the processed kind, are the ones that need to earn their place.
MyFitnessPal makes this impossible to argue with. Once you see the pie chart of your actual day laid out in front of you, it’s a clarifying moment that no amount of nutrition advice can replicate.
The data doesn’t lecture you. It just shows you what’s happening — and then you get to decide what to do about it.
The Bottom Line
MyFitnessPal is not a diet app. It’s a data app. And data doesn’t judge you — it just shows you what’s happening so you can make informed decisions. Most women who start tracking are surprised to find they’re not eating too much — they’re eating too many carbs, not enough protein, and often not enough total calories to support their actual life.
Once you see your numbers, you can start working with your body instead of against it. And that shift — from restriction to optimization — is where things actually start to change.
Up next in this series: Are Protein Bars Actually Healthy? The 3 Biggest Problems and 4 Rules for Choosing a Good One
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