How many carbs should you eat per day?
One of the most frequent questions I get asked is: how many carbs should I be eating per day?
As with everything else we discuss, the answer is that it totally depends on your goals, health status, training level, etc.
For example, a 300lb sedentary person will need fewer carbs than a 25 year old CrossFit athlete.
That being said there are good general guidelines we can give as a starting point. For most active adults, who typically weigh between 100-200 lbs, a good amount of daily carbs is:
100-200 grams per day.
A big difference between carbs and protein is that carb intake is, to a large extent, based on energy expenditure (i.e., how much you work out). This ranges from .5g/lb for sedentary individuals all the way up to 2g/lb for highly active individuals.
Most adult humans weigh between 100 and 200lbs and 1.0g of carbs per pound of bodyweight for generally active individuals is a good place to start for most people.
Whether you calculate this based on 1g/lb of weight based on a generally active individual or even based on 20-30% of total calories they’re all roughly speaking going to come out fairly close to 100-200g per day for most active adults.
How would this actually shake out in real life? Let’s say you had someone who weighed 150lbs who does CrossFit 3-4 times a week. There are so many factors to take into consideration, but generally speaking this peson would be getting around 150g of carbs per day. This would be 50g of carbs per meal assuming 3 meals.
In future videos, we’ll talk about what kinds of carbs you should be eating, and special considerations to take into account weighing and measuring carbs.
2019 05 08