We modern humans spend a hell of a long time meandering our way through the education system. We’ve scarcely spoken our first coherent sentences before we’re strapped into tiny backpacks for pre-school. We remain in the system until legal adulthood, finally graduating a dozen or more years later, knowing only those things that the system has seen fit to teach us (and often times, not even that).

I spent so much time in school that I often marvel at what I was somehow never taught.

I learned that the capital of Alaska is Juneau and the state bird of Utah is California Gull (naturally), but nobody ever spoke a word about personal finance.

The Dewey Decimal System was mandatory, but CPR — literally the ability to save another human life — somehow never made the curriculum.

Perhaps the most glaring omission was the ability to properly FEED MYSELF! Sure, there was the food pyramid, but how do you make it actionable? And is it even right? It seems to suggest that I should be eating more loaves of bread than fruits and vegetables combined.

I’ve since corrected these deficiencies in my practical worldly skillset, and I hope that you have too. But if not, I’m here to help. Well, with one of them, anyway.

Nutrition isn’t that hard.

Sure, there’s always more you could know about the intricacies of what vitamin XYZ is doing in your body (not a real vitamin btw), but most people can avoid major vitamin and mineral deficiencies by eating a varied diet that includes fruits, vegetables and whole grains. Not hard.

Where most people go wrong is in their macronutrient balance. They may count calories, but don’t differentiate at all between the sources of calories. In case you’re not familiar with the macronutrients, here’s a quick overview:

Carbohydrates: “carbs” contain 4 calories per gram and they’re used by your body (including the brain) for energy, especially quick energy (as you might expend during vigorous exercise).

Proteins: these also contain 4 calories per gram, and they form the building blocks for muscles and other organ systems. They’re essential for muscle repair & growth after exercise.

Fats: these contain 9 calories per gram, and are used by the body as a source of slower-release energy during light-to-moderate activity (above a certain effort threshold, your body would mostly use carbohydrates instead). They’re also important for proper hormonal balance and numerous other functions.

Carbs and fats are absolutely essential, yet they get a bad rap in our society, often blamed as causes of obesity. And they are causes of obesity, but only because of their excessive abundance in modern times.

You see, there was a time in our evolutionary history when food was scarce, and finding energy-dense resources like carbs and fat made the difference between survival and death. Because of this, the human brain evolved to find the tastes of these molecules highly rewarding. Back in those times, that was a good thing.

Modern humans retain the same affinity for energy-rich molecules, but those molecules are no longer scarce; you could easily eat five times your daily recommended intake for a couple dollars. Food companies take advantage of our innately wired affinity for energy-rich molecules to sell us far more of them than we should eat. This is not generally the case with the third macronutrient, protein, because a.) proteins tend to be more expensive, and b.) they don’t tend to be quite as delicious on their own (even if your favorite food is something like steak, it’s the fats within the meat that truly get your mouth watering).

But although carbs and fats certainly do have the potential to cause weight gain, we shouldn’t lose sight of the essential roles they play within the body. The key is to consume the appropriate amount of each macronutrient. You can find macro calculators online, like this one, which will ask you just a few basic questions before spitting out some numbers. The questions don’t go into detail about the types of physical activity you do, so these numbers won’t be perfect and you’ll have to dial them in over time using your own experience.

Next comes the part where I’m going to lose a lot of you. As you eat throughout the day, you’re going to want to track how many grams of each macronutrient are in every food that you consume. There are apps you can use to track this, or you can do what I used to do and tally them on the back of your hand with a ballpoint pen. Don’t worry, though; we’re not gonna track these that closely forever. I don’t tally my macros anymore because I know the macros for every food that I eat and can just think back to what I’ve eaten and what I still need to eat for the day. Over time, you will build an intuition for what you should be eating each day.

You don’t want to put your full faith in the estimates of an online macronutrient calculator, and the best way to test the accuracy of those estimates is with daily weigh-ins. Granted, weight doesn’t tell the whole story, given that you could lose fat and gain muscle and stay the same weight. But tracking your actual body composition would be far more difficult, so weight is a decent proxy. The best time to step on the scale is first thing in the morning, before consuming anything, for the most uniform measurements day to day. Even then, your weight will naturally fluctuate, so in order to evaluate if you’re making progress, take weekly averages of your daily weigh-ins and compare those to one another to find how your weight is trending.

Macros aren’t everything!

Once you’ve read your fair share of nutrition facts labels, you may come to the realization that you could, technically, eat your proper macronutrient balance while consuming nothing but beef jerky, table sugar and butter, day in and day out. The macro-mindset does not account for the quality of your macros, only the quantity, and it especially doesn’t encourage proper vegetable intake; there are many vegetables worth eating that have hardly any macronutrient content at all.

Here are a couple basic rules to steer you toward proper quality:

• Get your proteins from fresh, mostly lean meats (chicken and pork are great, inexpensive options), whey/casein protein powders, nuts and lentils.
• Sorry vegans; I have no idea how y’all achieve proper protein intake and I can offer no advice.
• Get your carbs from fresh fruits, vegetables and whole grains.
• Get a majority of your fats from plant-based sources, like nuts, olives/olive oil, or avocados (look for unsaturated fat in the nutrition facts).
• Getting the remainder of your fat intake from your protein sources (i.e., fatty meats) is fine, as long as it’s not your primary fat source.
• Buy products with ingredient lists that are both short and pronounceable! This will steer you toward more natural food.

If you can put into practice the tips in this article, you’ll have put your nutrition ahead of 95%* of the population (who also never learned this stuff in school). In a world filled with marketers and misinformation, it can be tough to get your nutritional bearings in the first place, so I hope I’ve helped get you moving in the right direction.

*completely fabricated statistic