Welcome to the nutrition side of MOVE. You’ve probably landed with us to address your training needs, but we have a lot going on in the background with nutrition and I wanted to introduce myself, the team, and some of our foundational basics.
I’m Ashleigh, Co-owner and CEO of MOVE. I’ve got a masters degree in clinical nutrition, in addition to being a Licensed Dietician (LDN). I’m also credentialed as a CNS (Certified Nutrition Specialist) and Sports Nutritionist. Add to that a graduate from the Kresser Institute of Functional Medicine and you have me as a great practitioner and resource.
The MOVE team working with me is equally as impressive, led by Coach Gabriella Mead. Gabby is a Certified Nutrition Coach via NASM (National Academy of Sports Medicine). Gabby worked with me as a client for 2 years prior to getting certified, and we continue our work together to this day.
Our current intern, Holanda Manzano, is also a Certified Nutrition Coach via NASM (National Academy of Sports Medicine). She worked with me as a client for 2 years, experiencing significant improvements in her training, health, and body composition. This journey inspired her to pursue formal education in the nutrition field and join us.
Our intention for you, landing on this page, is to give you insight into MOVEs foundational nutrition basics. Our basics cover information that is often confusing and controversial – our goal is to simplify it and give you some real insight (and numbers) to work with.
From there, if you want additional information about our coaching programs, you can discuss with us at MOVE, and/or book a 15-minute discovery call. We offer a wide range of services, including review of, or ordering of labs, comprehensive planning, customization, and education.
Now, let’s jump into the basics.
Before we talk about food quality, macros, meal timing, or supplements, we need to understand something more basic: how much energy your body actually needs.
This matters because a lot of people are either under-eating, overeating, or eating inconsistently without realizing it. Then they wonder why their energy is off, their body composition is not changing, or their progress feels all over the place.
When you understand your energy needs, nutrition becomes much less confusing. It gives us a starting point we can actually work from.
This section will help you understand two important ideas: your Physical Activity Level (PAL) and your Total Daily Energy Expenditure (TDEE).
PAL stands for Physical Activity Level. It is a number that helps estimate how active you are on a regular basis.
This is not just about whether you exercise. It includes your overall lifestyle too—how much you move during the day, whether you sit most of the time, whether you train hard, and how physically demanding your routine is overall.
PAL generally ranges from 1.2 to 2.4.
The important thing here is honesty. Most people tend to overestimate how active they are. That can make their nutrition targets inaccurate from the start.
TDEE stands for Total Daily Energy Expenditure. This is the total amount of energy, or calories, your body uses in a day.
It includes:
This number gives us a practical estimate of how much you need to eat to maintain your current body weight.
The basic formula is:
TDEE = BMR × PAL
Your BMR, or Basal Metabolic Rate, is the number of calories your body needs at rest to support basic functions like breathing, circulation, and organ function.
Once you multiply that by your PAL, you get an estimate of your daily energy needs.
Example:
1500 × 1.2 = 1800 calories per day
That means your body would need around 1800 calories per day to maintain your current state at that activity level.
Once you have an estimate of your TDEE, the next step is to compare that number to what you are actually doing.
Ask yourself:
This is where a lot of people get stuck. It is not always that they are doing everything wrong. Sometimes they simply do not have enough awareness of their baseline.
For example, someone may eat very little during the week, then overeat on weekends and feel like nothing makes sense. Someone else may think they are eating “healthy,” but still not be eating enough protein or total calories to support training and recovery.
Nutrition gets much easier once we stop guessing.
Once we have your energy needs in place, you can adjust your nutrition targets inside the app.
This is where we begin turning these concepts into an actual plan.
Once you understand roughly how much energy your body needs, the next step is understanding where that energy is coming from.
That is where macronutrients come in.
Macros are one of those terms people hear all the time, but a lot of people do not actually know what it means. They may have heard someone say “track your macros,” but do not really understand what they are tracking or why it matters.
So let’s make this simple.
Macro means big. Macronutrients are the larger nutrients your body needs in significant amounts. There are three of them:
Micronutrients are the smaller nutrients—things like vitamins and minerals.
Everything you eat contains a mix of macros and micros. Once you understand the basic role of each macro, nutrition becomes much more practical and much less intimidating.
In this section, we are going to look at each one individually so you understand what it does, why it matters, and how it fits into your goals.
If there is one macronutrient that tends to make the biggest difference for most people, it is protein.
Protein plays a major role in body composition, recovery, strength, and long-term health. It helps shape how your body looks, how it performs, and how well it holds onto muscle over time.
And the truth is, most people are not eating enough of it.
Protein is especially important because it supports muscle protein synthesis (MPS), which is the process your body uses to repair and build muscle tissue. If you are training, trying to improve body composition, or simply trying to age well, this matters a lot.
It also becomes more important as you get older.
After age 50, we naturally begin losing muscle mass and strength each year. That decline tends to accelerate with age. Maintaining muscle is not just about aesthetics—it affects your metabolism, insulin sensitivity, physical function, and long-term resilience.
Skeletal muscle makes up a large portion of lean body mass, so protecting it has a huge impact on overall health. This is one reason protein intake and resistance training are such powerful tools.
At a basic level, a meal usually needs around 25–35g of protein to meaningfully stimulate muscle protein synthesis. A rough guideline is about 0.4g per kg of body weight per meal as a minimum effective dose.
That said, total daily intake matters most.
For muscle gain:
For fat loss:
Higher protein intake during fat loss is useful because it helps increase satiety, preserve muscle, and support better body composition while calories are lower.
You may have heard the idea that anything over 30g of protein in one sitting is wasted or excreted.
That is not accurate.
Your body can use larger doses of protein. Larger servings may simply take longer to digest and absorb. What matters most is your total intake across the day and your overall consistency.
In other words, do not get stuck obsessing over perfect timing while missing the bigger picture.
For most people, simply increasing protein intake in a consistent way creates a huge shift.
Carbohydrates are one of the most misunderstood parts of nutrition.
Technically, they are considered “non-essential,” which means your body can create glucose from other nutrients like protein and fat when it needs to.
But that does not mean carbs are unimportant.
From a practical coaching perspective, carbohydrates play a major role in performance, recovery, strength, training output, and muscle growth. They are often the main fuel source your body relies on during higher-intensity exercise.
So while you can survive without carbs, most people do not perform optimally without enough of them.
People who keep carbs too low for too long often notice things like:
This is one reason carb intake should be based on the person, the training load, and the goal—not on trends.
One lens that can be useful here is body type.
This is not meant to box you in, but it can be a helpful starting point when thinking about how someone tends to respond to carbohydrates.
Ectomorph
Endomorph
Mesomorph
This is not the only thing that matters, but it can help guide your starting point.
A practical starting range for carbohydrates may look like this:
Carbohydrates are often the most flexible macro. We can move them up or down depending on how you are training, how you are recovering, and how your body is responding.
That is why context matters so much. Carbs are not “good” or “bad.” They are a tool, and the right amount depends on the person using them.
Fats have been unfairly demonized for a long time, but they are absolutely essential for good health.
They are not the enemy. In fact, the right fats support a huge number of important functions in the body.
Dietary fat helps with:
Fats also contain more than twice the calories per gram compared to protein and carbohydrates, which is one reason they can be so satisfying in a meal.
A simple baseline is:
0.8 grams of fat per kg of body weight
Example: if you weigh 70kg, a good starting point would be around 56g of fat per day.
This gives us a solid floor to support health, hormones, and basic physiological function.
Quality matters here too.
Kitchen staples:
From the ocean:
Plant-based options:
Supplements if needed:
The goal is not to fear fats. The goal is to include the right ones consistently.
This page is meant to give you a basic understanding of the concepts we build on inside our Nutrition Coaching.
You do not need to memorize everything. You do not need to become a nutrition expert overnight. What matters is that you start thinking about nutrition with more clarity and less guesswork.
First, understand your energy needs.
Then, understand the role of protein, carbohydrates, and fats.
From there, everything becomes more intentional.
For some of you, this will already be enough to start making better decisions on your own.
But if you want to go deeper—if you want a plan that is built specifically for your body, your lifestyle, your training, and your goals—that is where coaching comes in.
Inside our Nutrition Program, we don’t just give you numbers or meal plans. We look at the full picture, identify what’s actually holding you back, and build a strategy that you can realistically follow and sustain.
If you’re interested in learning more about how this works, you can start here:
You’ll fill out a short form first, and our team will reach out to guide you through the next steps.