How are we not talking about Macrofactor more often?

There are too many failure points for calorie expenditure calculations. For one, to have an accurate one you need to have a watch on all day, and they mostly can’t compensate precisely for factors like slowing metabolism as you lose weight or muscle mass.

If you take off your watch at any point you miss any potential reduction in NEAT (non-exercise activity thermogenesis) activities that may result because of earlier calorie burning from exercise or activity.

Macrofactor by comparison doesn’t use ANY activity data and relies on only two sets of data to make its calorie expenditure estimates - calorie intake versus weight trend. Using the delta between them, and the conversion between calories and weight it generates an expenditure which can accurately capture all of the aforementioned factors -

Your (Actual) Basal Metabolic Level 24 hours a day + Non Exercise Activity Thermogenesis (Aka fidgeting or small movements that burn small amounts of calories) + Walking + Any other activity, like exercise

Whereas just wearing your watch 24/7 can give you an estimate of your BML, but to my knowledge those are mostly based upon your height, weight and dominant hormone cocktail on watches as opposed to measuring how fast your metabolism is burning. (Correct me if I’m wrong, I haven’t had time to research this part.)

Three objections

A / B) Wait, shouldn’t my calorie counting app care how many steps / how many calories I burn during exercise?

Not if it’s reducing your NEAT (fidgeting, small calorie burning motions) throughout the day, or in the latter case, slowing down your metabolism even if your muscle mass remains high.
C) But I like eating more calories on certain days!

Macrofactor’s got you covered. You can shift your calories so you eat more on certain days and less on others.

If you get started, they also run the Stronger by Science blog where they post a bunch of research related to weight loss / gain and exercise / lifting, where they also go through some of the methodology they use for Macrofactor. I would recommend a weekly rate of 0.25% body mass loss per week, as on the Stronger by Science blog they’ve found research shows you can effectively keep muscle mass on, so long as you don’t lose more than 0.5% body mass per week. Targeting about half that rate has been very sustainable for me over the past year of using the app.

Here’s a few screenshots from my data from the last few months of using the app.


It actually feels quite random when your body starts burning more calories or less calories, but I can usually correlate a period of three months of sustained change like exercise with a reduction in calories burned, or losing significant amounts of weight.

I would recommend starting with a cognitive behavioural therapy like Noom first if you have been struggle with the psychological aspect of calorie counting, as I couldn’t use Macrofactor at all until I broke the brain processes that made me eat as a response to stress instead of hunger.

In terms of Beeminder, I use a do-less goal to help me keep on my Macrofactor calorie goal. Having two places to enter calories makes me think more about what I eat and keeps me from panic eating. I’ve been sticking with having the same calories each day, and having a lag of 7 days of what my calorie goal is (from beeminder) has been quite useful.

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I usually see this abbreviated as BMR. For those just tuning in, that’s basal metabolic rate – the number of calories you’d burn per day if you never got out of bed. The standard formula is:

10m + 6.25h -5a + 5s - 161(1-s)

where m is your mass in kilograms, h is your height in centimeters, a is your age in years, and s is 1 for male, 0 for female.

My understanding is that fitness trackers / smartwatches use that formula for BMR and then estimate active calories from heartrate and movement. I posted about the discrepancy between Fitbit and Garmin in that regard the other day: Garmin is very stingy with burned calories compared to Fitbit

It’s very possible that fitness trackers are failing to account for fidgetiness, unless that manifests as a slightly higher heart rate. I need to look into this more as well.

I’m still thinking about the rest of this but am very intrigued; it’s very related to what we’re doing in Mindful Munching w/ Metrics right now.

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I like the idea of MF and tried it the first time a ways back. It was fine but at the time their database was missing most of the foods I was eating and MFP plus Garmin was easier and allowing me to hit my weight goals even with the potential inaccuracies. (I might be lucky with Garmin’s formula just working for me)

That said, I definitely had an adherence problem where I’d fall off the wagon in moments of stress…

I restarted MF in January with a focus on their macro recommendations. This where I think they shine. Before I was eating relatively high protein and extra garbage if I wanted and it fit.

Now, I have such a high protein goals that I’ve become very mindful of the how even though there are no restrictions if I want to meet the goal of eating enough protein I won’t want to eat candy.

Some days I end with my protein goal met and some buffer for a small treat which is a nice bonus. I’m also less hungry in general as a bonus.

I’m still using my Garmin goal but I’ll think about a good MF goal. I don’t want it overly strict as MF’s tracking a lagging indicator and allows flexibility.

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MF’s label scanner is top notch stuff now, no?

On an unrelated note, my favorite feature is that it can calculate (if you wish) the exact number of grams of a certain food you need for a certain number of calories, or, if you want, a certain macro target. Set it to grams mode, switch over to calories and bam, I need 56 grams of x food I just selected to have this many calories :sunglasses:

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I am a recent user of MF (about 40 days), and it has been working nicely. Enough to make me drop my long-running (several years) subscription of MyFitnessPal. The concepts behind the app and the UX/UI are a big upgrade.
You can check this blog post for more of their ideas

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How about integration with Macrofactor? Would be great!

UPDATE: but there is an integration! Macrofactor → Apple Health → Beeminder!

Great, thank you so much!

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Update: I’ve now been using Macrofactor for a few weeks and it’s very well done. The AI for estimating calories by taking a picture of your plate is impressive and makes calorie-counting frictionless enough. (And, yeah, it can’t tell if you added an extra stick of butter to the spaghetti sauce or whatever, but, pragmatically, just letting it make its best guess is good enough. Ice cream truck loopholes.)

What I do still need is a way to beemind adherence to what Macrofactor tells me to do. Maybe just a do-more goal for protein and do-less for calories.

PS: I’m also impressed with Macrofactor’s articles on nutrition and weight management, such as this one: How Much Protein Should I Eat? - MacroFactor

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I’ve been looking for an excuse for me to post my success in using the tool Macrofactor gives that no other calorie counting app can accurately give to you - weekly / daily calorie deficit, and using it with a do-more goal in Beeminder.

Macrofactor can calculate the difference between what your body is burning and your caloric intake for the day, and it shows up as a metric at the bottom of the screen. So…

I created a beeminder do more goal where my daily goal is to get my weekly deficit to a point where I stay above the red-line, with the rate of the red-line set to the delta between my current weight and my target weight in pounds, multiplied by 3500 (since there are 3500 calories in a pound).

SO. Each day, the datapoint that I enter is a SEVEN DAY average of the actual calorie deficit I have as calculated by beeminder.

I tried using a do-less goal for calorie counting with Beeminder in the past, and it sucked grass, because every day I would eat to the limit and feel like I was never accomplishing anything, and then never felt incentivized to eat less - plus it felt impossible to create buffer to eat more.

By logging a seven day buffer, eating less on one day has positive effects on your 7 day deficit for the next six days, and overeating is averaged out over 7 days so that any bad overeating days don’t instantly derail you.

FOR EXAMPLE, yesterday I ate several hundred calories over my goal and a few hundred over expenditure but was able to still log a positive 227 calorie deficit in Beeminder. Why? Because doing calorie logging in Beeminder rewards me for having dieted for the past six days. And dieting on previous days where I wasn’t so hungry feels good because I see a number go up (weekly deficit) that I input into beeminder, rather than seeing the dread of a number of calories I have remaining go down.

Do I want to prepare for a vacation the next week? Let’s say I want to hit a target calorie deficit of 220 so that I’m one day ahead.

I can quickly eyeball the number of calories I need to eat in order to hit my blue calorie goal by taking my current energy balance (360) and subtracting my goal 7 day deficit (220) = 140, and multiplying that number by 7. So that means I’ve got 980 more calories to eat today if I want to have a day of buffer where bad stuff happens.

And yeah, based on my success with this, I think a do more for protein would also be awesome as well. :slightly_smiling_face: I just don’t worry too much about protein but I’m curious how well that goes - and, honestly, whether eating more protein one day helps the next day? I know macrofactor has relevant articles on how protein presence relates to muscle buildup / breakdown on a cyclical basis…

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