Macro Tracking Fried Food

Hello again! Thank you for your patience in the past. I’ve successfully managed to move to maintaining my weight for 2-3 weeks to a mild bulk gaining about 0.3-0.4% BW a week (I assume this is what I should be doing now!) and have been seeing good progress in my lifts.

Although I generally never cook fried foods for practical reasons (easier to hit lower fat macros without it, not as high-quality a nutritional food), I love to cook and there are some cultural foods that I would love to make more regularly, but they require frying. Also, loving to cook in general, sometimes I’ll want to learn to make something, but it requires frying, and I can’t help but see it as a total black box that I have no clue how to log (especially because you can fry for different periods of time at different temperatures), which means I never want to do it. (Though maybe this is a blessing in disguise, :P)

I’ve never seen this discussed somewhere, but there must be some practical way to do this… right? I would love to fry foods, but I don’t know how to make it fit with my training nutrition and health goals.

I should start out by saying I don’t think this matters unless you’re consuming fried foods multiple times per week regularly, which is probably incompatible with a healthy diet.

The effects of frying on fat content and other properties of food depend on a number of factors, such as the oil used, the type of frying, the food being fried, the time the food is fried, and more.

Rather than review all of this and make some complicated recommendations, I’d just recommend adding a serving of fat (~14g) to your macros per serving of fried food. It’s not super accurate, but workable.

As a final point, I’d like to push back against “I don’t know how to make it fit with my training nutrition and health goals.” Sure you do! You know that consuming fried food regularly is not part of a health promoting diet. You also know that what you habitually eat, e.g. your dietary pattern, is far more important than what you eat infrequently. Give yourself some credit here :slight_smile:

Tl;dr- fugde some added fat macros for fried food, but don’t eat fried food regularly

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