MacroFactor uses a unique energy expenditure calculation and all of the weight and nutrition information you log to personalize your calorie intake targets, much like a nutrition coach would.

You probably are familiar with CICO: Calories in – Calories out = Change in stored energy. If you eat fewer calories than you expend, you will lose weight. If you eat more calories than you expend, you will gain weight.

Other food loggers help you quantify “calories out” by tracking your caloric intake.

• But: They use rough, static formulas or unreliable expenditure estimates from wearables to inform your calorie targets.
• What that means for you: Using an outdated or unreliable expenditure estimate means you can’t solve the CICO equation. The estimate doesn’t accurately account for changes in your energy needs from lifestyle, activity, and weight or nutrition shifts. You don’t know how much to eat to reach your goals, the scale stops moving, and you hit frustrating plateaus.

MacroFactor is the only food logger on the market to use a dynamic algorithm that dials in your “calories out” much more accurately.

• How? The app continually updates and refines your personalized expenditure estimate based on your nutrition data and your rate of weight gain or loss.
• What that means for you: Using a best-in-class expenditure estimate, MacroFactor can adapt to changes in your metabolism so you never plateau.

The bottom line: MacroFactor keeps pace with your ever-changing energy needs and updates your expenditure estimate as needed to ensure that your calorie targets are appropriate for your goals.

MacroFactor’s database covers most staple foods (fruits, vegetables, meats, grains, dairy products) and has excellent barcode support in the US, Canada, the UK, Australia, Ireland,  New Zealand, and most of Western Europe (including France, Spain, Germany, and Italy).

Countries outside of those may see fewer localized options, but users can still log from the huge library of common foods, and add custom foods and recipes for local foods. We are also taking steps to improve branded product and barcode support for everyone. 

No, there won’t be a free version – for a few reasons. MacroFactor will be ad-free and focused on making the user experience as seamless and user-friendly as possible. Stronger By Science also partnered with the app developers (instead of just hiring them as contractors and then sending them on their way once we launch). That means the app will be continually improving and updated all the time, but it also means the app needs to make money to make it worth all the time and effort from the developers.

MacroFactor’s prices are set at a competitive rate, though, and you have the option to choose from three subscription options to find the one that works best for you.

We do also offer a free trial, so you can try it out before being charged.

Currently, we don’t pull data from smart watches or activity trackers for one simple reason: they don’t seem to do a particularly good job of estimating energy expenditure.

Instead, we look at trended weight changes and compare those changes to calorie intake in order to back-calculate energy expenditure. We have some ideas about how we may be able to use activity data to further tweak and fine-tune our energy expenditure estimations at the margins, so we do plan on allowing users to integrate with activity trackers eventually (so we can empirically test those ideas). But for now, data from activity trackers wouldn’t affect the core functionality of the app: weight and nutrition data give us all the information we need to generate and adjust macro programs.

MacroFactor’s prices are set at a competitive rate, though, and you have the option to choose from three subscription options to find the one that works best for you.

We do also offer a free trial, so you can try it out before being charged.

Not right now, but that’s something we’re planning on adding in the future.

Yes! Through our integrations with Apple Health, Google Fit, and Fitbit, MacroFactor supports historical import of the last 30 days of data. This is more than enough to kickstart our analytics, and give you highly optimized recommendations on day one.

We don’t currently have a built-in coaching portal to allow you to see and manage your clients’ nutrition programs in-app. However, we make it easy for users to take screenshots of their nutrition information for the past week, and more importantly, we make it easy for users to export their daily weight, calorie intake, and macronutrient intake data to a spreadsheet, which they could send to a coach. MacroFactor also allows users to set custom macro targets day-to-day, which will make it simple for your clients to adjust their daily targets to match your recommendations. MacroFactor also supplies information that other apps don’t, including sophisticated weight trending and updating estimations of daily energy expenditure, which might help you make better diet adjustments for your clients. In short, we’re not going to pretend that MacroFactor is a game changer for nutrition coaches, but, relative to other nutrition apps, it should reduce a bit of friction to make your life (and your clients’ lives) a little easier.

Your estimated energy expenditure is a deterministic calculation based on your calorie intake and changes in body weight.

We start with the basic energy balance equation: Calories in – Calories out = Change in stored energy (and changes in stored energy obviously come with changes in weight over time). Since we want to estimate your energy expenditure, we need to rearrange the equation to solve for “Calories out”: Calories in – Change in stored energy = Calories out.

“Calories in” is simple to calculate, since you’re either logging your food in MacroFactor, or importing nutrition information from another source that’s synced with this app. “Change in stored energy” is slightly tougher to estimate, since we’re ultimately working with weight data. However, we can use information about your rate of weight change and the caloric content of fat tissue versus lean tissue to estimate the change in stored energy associated with your changes in weight (fat has a greater energy density than lean mass; at slower rates of weight loss or faster rates of weight gain, we anticipate that a larger proportion of the weight you gained or lost came from fat mass). From there, it’s simply a matter of solving the equation.

For example, if we estimate that you’ve been in an energy surplus of 200 Calories per day based on the rate at which your weight has been changing, and we can see that you’ve been eating approximately 3000 Calories per day, we can calculate that your daily energy expenditure is approximately 3000 – 200 = 2800 Calories.

As you continue to use MacroFactor, we’ll continue monitoring your energy intake and changes in weight to update your calculated energy expenditure. If you gain or lose a substantial amount of weight, or if your activity levels change, we won’t have to guess how those changes will impact your daily energy expenditure; we’ll be able to measure the impact, and adjust your calorie and macro recommendations accordingly.

Since our calculation of your energy expenditure is based solely on tracked energy intake and changes in weight, that allows our calorie and macro adjustments and recommendations to be “adherence-neutral.” In other words, you don’t have to be a robot with perfect dietary adherence for MacroFactor to make appropriate updates to your calorie and macro recommendations, based on your goals. If you eat a little more or a little less one week than your macro program recommended, that’s totally fine! Your updated calorie and macro recommendations for the next week are based on your actual energy intake and changes in weight, not how well you stuck to our recommendations. Not only does this allow our systems to be more robust to deviations from your macro program (which are totally fine; we don’t expect people to be robots), but we also hope that this “adherence-neutral” system will make deviations from your macro program less psychologically stressful. Since our system doesn’t require or expect perfect dietary adherence to make appropriate updates to your calorie and macro targets, that should lessen the perceived psychological cost of occasionally deviating from your recommended calorie targets.

As one final note, this calculation of energy expenditure is really at the heart of MacroFactor, and a lot of work has gone into ensuring that it’s as accurate and reliable as possible, given what we know about human physiology and metabolism. We’ve also taken great care to make it as robust as possible to less-than-perfect tracking (the more consistently you track your weight and nutrition, the better our recommendations will be, but if you occasionally forget to log your weight or nutrition, our algorithms still do an admirable job of rolling with the punches). However, it has one Achilles heel: partial nutrition tracking. If, for example, you track your breakfast and lunch one day, but you don’t put your dinner in the Food Log, we have no way of knowing that your energy intake for the day is incorrect, and your estimated daily energy expenditure (and future calorie recommendations) will decrease accordingly. However, as long as you avoid partial nutrition tracking, we should be able to accurately and reliably estimate your energy expenditure, and therefore recommend and appropriately adjust calorie and macro targets for you based on your goals.