New and Noteworthy
Case study: Daniel’s 50lb weight loss
Daniel DeBrocke, a 34-year-old competitive powerlifter and director of education curriculum at Kabuki Strength, used MacroFactor to lose 50 pounds and drop body fat while maintaining muscle.
When he downloaded MacroFactor, Daniel weighed about 285 pounds and was ~30% bodyfat. After a slow and steady 8-month cutting diet, he reached his goal of 11% bodyfat at a weight of 235 pounds.
“The simplicity, the speed, the accuracy, and ability to individualize things [in MacroFactor] was exponentially better than anything I’ve used, and I’ve used virtually all the available apps at one point in time,” he said.
Read Daniel’s full story in the new case study.
How Daniel Used MacroFactor to Lose 50lb While Maintaining Muscle
Community Spotlight
We love hearing from and chatting with you in our communities on Facebook and Reddit.
This month, we want to shout out a few users who posted about making progress or hitting their goals in the last month:
- u/ComprehensiveMix1640 on Reddit wrote a super helpful and detailed breakdown of his 40lb weight loss with MacroFactor (including app screenshots, progress pictures, and tips for others with similar goals). He also reached an impressive 365-day logging streak!
- Branden in the Facebook group is losing fat, gaining muscle, and feeling better in his body.
- Dalton in the Facebook group is nearing the end of his cut, and says tracking in MacroFactor has become second nature.
We also loved reading through this thread, in which several users shared their success stories and offered support and encouragement to a new MFer.
Thank you to all of you who help make our communities what they are: supportive, kind, helpful, and fun. We appreciate you.
If you aren’t in the communities yet, you can join the Facebook group here or find the subreddit here.
Food Logging FAQ
We have a lot of new friends in the app (thank you!), so today, we want to take some space to answer a few common questions on food logging in MacroFactor.
Q: Should I view my daily macro goals as the ceiling and try to stay under them? Or are they a target that I should try to get as close to without going over?
A: It’s up to you! And, largely, it depends on how you view your goal.
So, for instance, let’s assume you set a goal of losing a pound per week.
If you treated that goal as, “I want to lose at least a pound per week,” then it might make sense to treat the daily calorie target as a ceiling – if you’re generally below your calorie target, you should lose weight a bit faster than the goal you set for yourself.
If you treated the goal as, “I want to lose around a pound per week,” then it makes sense to treat your daily target as a target – just try to get close to it most days. If you’re a bit over sometimes, and a bit under sometimes, it’s all good, as long as you’re reasonably close most days.
If you treated the goal as, “A pound per week is the fastest I’d be comfortable with losing,” then it makes sense to treat your daily target as a minimum, and your expenditure as a maximum. As long as you’re between those two numbers, you’ll lose weight, but your rate of weight loss won’t exceed the target you’ve set for yourself.
But, basically, put some thought into how you view your goal in the app, and interact with your targets accordingly.
Q: What should I do for meals or days that I can’t track food super accurately? Is it better to leave a day on food log blank or to guesstimate calories?
A: Our general rule of thumb is:
- If you think you can guess within roughly 30% of your total calorie intake for the day, you should log those guesstimates.
- If you have absolutely no idea how much you ate in a given day and don’t feel confident guessing within roughly 30% of your total calorie intake for the day, it might be better to leave the day blank. Just make sure not to partially log (i.e., logging your breakfast, but then not logging a meal later in the day).
Some tips for guesstimating:
Find similar foods: Even if you can’t weigh out the individual components of the meal, one option is to track a similar selection of foods from the food database in MacroFactor.
- For example, if you eat pizza but don’t know the nutrition information for the dough, the sauce, the cheese, and the toppings, you could find a pizza entry within the food database that seems to be approximately similar in composition.
This will inevitably be a rough estimation method, but you can skew the estimation error in a manner that suits your goal; you might overestimate portion sizes a little bit when pursuing a weight loss goal, or underestimate portion sizes a little bit when pursuing a weight gain goal.
Quick add: If you’re looking for a slightly more efficient approach, you could simply estimate the total calories in the meal and add them via the “quick add” feature – as long as you get within 30% or so, you’re in a good spot. Once again, you can intentionally over- or under-estimate a little bit, just to ensure that you’re erring on the safe side with regards to your specific goal.
(Full article – Excerpt from “Tracking Dietary Intake” section)
What’s Next
Right now, we are doing some foundational work to improve the app’s performance and make your experience using the app even smoother.
In the last month, we released four stability and performance releases – 1.6.10, 1.6.11, 1.6.12, and 1.6.13.
Want to learn more? Check our public roadmap to see our short- to medium-term plans for new features and improvements. You can also submit features for consideration and vote on the upcoming features that are the highest priority to you.
