Faithful Readers know I’ve been a food logger/tracker for many years. I used the Lose It app for the bulk of those years, with a quick, painful peek at My Fitness Pal, and a reasonable effort to use Cronometer. Lose It always won out for its simplicity and ease of use, so when the Stronger by Science guys came out with their own food logging app, I was attracted to the shiny new object but had no intention of actually using it. That is until I found out that it’s not just another food logging app.
The real trick to managing one’s weight is to manage one’s intake. It’s really that simple. Knowing how many calories you’re consuming every day vs. how many you need to consume to maintain your body weight is the key to success. I’ve never been able to manage that without actually tracking my food, so that’s a given. There are anecdotes of people who can do it while estimating food portion sizes and so forth, but like Bigfoot, I’ve never seen them.
So if you know you’re going to track your food, all you need is a simple way to do that right? Sure, which is why I used Lose it. But just tracking your food doesn’t give you the ultimate answer to the ultimate question: how much do I need to eat? The methods I’ve used in the past have worked for me, but they were relatively labor intensive:
- Weigh in each morning at the same time before I’ve had anything to eat or drink.
- Log that weight in a spreadsheet.
- Average it out each week to try to smooth out the fluctuations.
If my weight didn’t change in two weeks, I’d have to make a change to my calories. For example, let’s say I was trying to lose body fat. I’d have to ensure I was in a calorie deficit, so I’d take my best guess at how many calories I need, log my food, track my weight and if my average weight decreased after two weeks, I’d know I was in a deficit, so I’d continue. If it didn’t, I’d reduce my calories by some amount, and repeat.
In comes MacroFactor with an improvement to my method! They use my daily weigh-ins, do some voodoo math to smooth out the fluctuations, take the calories I’m consuming and determine my daily energy expenditure. I can then tell MF if I’d like to gain or lose weight, and at what rate, and it will set my calories for me. Every week, it will update those calories to keep me on track. Essentially, they do all the work I used to do on a spreadsheet, but rather than guess at the change in calories I need to make, they calculate them.
I used MF for a mass gaining phase, and it was the easiest and most successful such phase I’ve ever done. You can see the scale weight vs. the trend weight, which is the smoothing of daily fluctuations I mentioned, in the photo below. The trend was a nice, steady increase in body weight (which hopefully included some new muscle fiber vs. just getting fatter) and as you can see in the last few weeks, I’ve ended that mass gain phase and have started deficit eating to drop some body fat.
I can go on about the quality of the food database, or the speed of logging, or all the other things people seem to find important, but for me the only reason I use MF vs. Lose it is for the expenditure and calorie calculations. That’s literally the hardest part of managing your weight and they make it effortless. Think about that: effortless. I weigh in, I log my food, and that’s it. You can choose a “coached” diet plan where they calculate your protein, carbohydrate and fat intake, or the “collaborative” plan where you can choose the distribution. I use the latter to tweak it to my preferences, but if you have no idea how to set up the distribution of calories, they’ll do that for you too.
It’s not free, but it shouldn’t be. There are no ads dirtying up the display and the fact that they take the guesswork out of the most challenging aspect of managing your weight makes it a valuable tool, so the annual $60 subscription is money well spent in my view. I’m not sponsored by MF, I won’t get paid for saying nice things about them, and I have no vested interest. It’s just awesome, and awesomeness should be celebrated.
Joe's Blog 