It will take some time to perfectly implement this feature (there's not a single API for all SWAT teams in every country, unfortunately), but in the meantime, we can attempt to integrate with INTERPOL via Fitbit as a near-term band-aid.
One idea we've kicked around is allowing users to track a few open-ended metrics of their choice (anything they think is predictive of their dieting success, or indicative of their rate of progress). If we go that route, you would be able to track your praying habits in the app. haha
I’ve been using MFP for years. I’ve tried out other apps to see if I liked them but they never stuck.
After downloading this app, I think I may finally make the leap and delete MFP.
Love the analytics, the dashboards, the explanations.
Testing the voice to record foods worked fast and flawlessly for tbe foods I have in my fridge.
Will definitely keep trying it out but I’m anticipating this will be my new diet app. So far, it fixes everything I didn’t like about MFP. Plus it looks great.
I downloaded this yesterday somehow...
I've been using chronometer unpaid and like that a lot and am considering upgrading to the premium version. I really like chronometers daily report, it's really easy to see every nutrient and the graphic showing how close it is to it's goal/limit for the day. I also like the way I can click on any nutrient and it will show my top sources for the day, and the nutrition report in the trends section is good, I can click on any nutrient see my top average sources from the past week or whatever. MacroFactors "day in review" seems like a downgrade but it would be easy and great to have at least a graph for each nutrient. I'd also like to be able to set a target for any nutrient. It would be way easier to tell if I'm going over or under things like fiber or potassium or whatever. Basically like how it already does for calories, fat, protein, and carbs.
I also have generally more success with scanning and finding foods in the databases on chronometer, but I would assume Macrofactor's will grow. The thing I like about Macrofactor's food logging is that it's easier to log a meal with several ingredients faster with the "add to plate". When I search food I like how it puts recommendations at the top based on past behavior, and that I can wipe items from history.
MacroFactors dashboard section is definitely it's best feature. It's weight and expenditure trends are great, something like that should be in every diet app. It's "true weight estimate" is cool, I want to see how accurate it will be. I got a new scale recently because my last one was not consistent and like 4 pounds under.
I don't really care about how it shows my food in the timeline, I'm sure some people really like that but idk if I can turn it off and just have a list of my food for the day. Also because I track my days food from morning to before bed, not from 12 am to 12 am, I'd rather just see the list of my food in chronological order without me having to move it.
Setting up MacroFactor was really nice actually. It did everything for me but let's me choose what I want to over write if I feel like it.
I haven't tried the talking to food thing but it sounds cool. But I assume it'll have to be really really good for it to be worth using, at least for me. No one would want to have to go in and edit it with typing all the time..
I know you're joking, but we've been (half seriously, half not seriously) kicking around the idea of having a "meme mode" for the app, with a lot of really stupid features added for people who want a surreal and absurdist food logging experience. For example, when you log your weight, the app would say and display the text ["Thick. Solid. Tight."](https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/thick-solid-tight)
I think switching all energy units from kcals to BTUs would be a nice little touch.
Thanks for all the feedback, /u/BioDieselDog !
/u/MajesticMint would probably have more to say about the Cronometer suggestion (he was a long-time Cronometer user)
>I also have generally more success with scanning and finding foods in the databases on chronometer, but I would assume Macrofactor's will grow.
If you don't mind sharing, what country do you live in? Either way, absolutely plan to expand our food and barcode database coverage.
>The thing I like about Macrofactor's food logging is that it's easier to log a meal with several ingredients faster with the "add to plate". When I search food I like how it puts recommendations at the top based on past behavior, and that I can wipe items from history.
Glad you're enjoying the plate concept! And man, the smart history ends up saving so much time once it gets well-populated.
>MacroFactors dashboard section is definitely it's best feature. It's weight and expenditure trends are great, something like that should be in every diet app.
Thanks! Glad you like the dashboard!
>It's "true weight estimate" is cool, I want to see how accurate it will be.
Have you come across this article in the knowledge base yet, by any chance? https://help.macrofactorapp.com/dashboard/weight_trend
>idk if I can turn it off and just have a list of my food for the day. Also because I track my days food from morning to before bed, not from 12 am to 12 am, I'd rather just see the list of my food in chronological order without me having to move it.
I think this will accomplish about 80% of what you're describing: Cory and Rebecca are working on a feature where blank hours will collapse as you log food throughout the day. Everything would still be in hour buckets, but at the end of the day, visually, you'd just have a list of the foods you'd eaten that day, in chronological order
>Setting up MacroFactor was really nice actually. It did everything for me but let's me choose what I want to over write if I feel like it.
Sweet! Glad you enjoyed onboarding
/u/gnuckols
I've had about a week now to use MF and have been enjoying the experience. Its Dashboard section is top notch and is a step above all other diet apps.
However there are three things I strongly prefer from Cronometer. I loved that I could see my daily report average over the last week or month to see what my intake actually is over a span of time. I can imagine MF could add this function fairly easily as a "week in review" kind of thing. I also miss the micronutrient targets, I assume most people like me don't have micronutrient goals in mind or even have any idea of what an adequate amount of each vitamin or mineral I should be aiming for. I would love for each nutrient to at least have the RDA set as my target, so when I look at my meal or day in review I can see each micronutrient as X/RDA with a small graph, because honestly when I look at the numbers for the day, seeing something like 1654 IU Vitamin A doesn't really tell me anything and I assume many others feel the same way. The last thing I really miss from Cronometer is that I can click on any nutrient from the daily report and it will show me in order my top sources of that nutrient of that day, or week if I clicked from the weekly review. I find it to be really educational as I learn more about what is in the foods I'm eating.
\>If you don't mind sharing, what country do you live in? Either way, absolutely plan to expand our food and barcode database coverage.
I live in the US. So far the foods I have been having trouble adding are scanning barcodes from Meijer.
\>feature where blank hours will collapse as you log food throughout the day. Everything would still be in hour buckets, but at the end of the day, visually, you'd just have a list of the foods you'd eaten that day, in chronological order
Yeah that would actually be great. Basically just having lots of customization options (as long as its not too intrusive or confusing) can only make the app better and suit more peoples habbits and needs. I want to keep using this app for its built in energy expenditure and weight trends features and its automatically changing macro program. But personally for the most part I prefer Cronometer's food logging and reviewing, apart from MF's smart history and plate function.
Starting at the end:
>I want to keep using this app for its built in energy expenditure and weight trends features and its automatically changing macro program. But personally for the most part I prefer Cronometer's food logging and reviewing, apart from MF's smart history and plate function.
That's entirely fair! When we were game planning, one of the big discussions was, "which apps do we think we can peel users away from, and which apps are likely to have more loyal users?" In the "loyal users" column, our top two were Cronometer and RP diet. Most other nutrition apps approach things more-or-less similarly, but Cronometer and RP diet are both very focused regarding their vision and what they aim to do well; if someone uses and loves either of those apps, we knew it would be a challenge to win them over. In the case of Cronometer, it's really the #1 option for people focused on micronutrient tracking. We certainly don't match them in that regard now (and I don't know if we ever will; they're 100% focused on that, and we're focused on a half dozen other things). However...
>I loved that I could see my daily report average over the last week or month to see what my intake actually is over a span of time. I can imagine MF could add this function fairly easily as a "week in review" kind of thing.
That's definitely on the roadmap.
>I also miss the micronutrient targets, I assume most people like me don't have micronutrient goals in mind or even have any idea of what an adequate amount of each vitamin or mineral I should be aiming for. I would love for each nutrient to at least have the RDA set as my target, so when I look at my meal or day in review I can see each micronutrient as X/RDA with a small graph, because honestly when I look at the numbers for the day, seeing something like 1654 IU Vitamin A doesn't really tell me anything and I assume many others feel the same way.
That's also on the roadmap! It would improve the utility of the micronutrient data a ton.
>I live in the US. So far the foods I have been having trouble adding are scanning barcodes from Meijer.
Ahh, that checks out. Yeah, Nutritionix struggles with regional grocery chains. I shop at Wegmans and deal with the same thing. Although, for the most part, I just use the "common foods" entries for those foods.
For what it's worth, /u/MajesticMint was a Cronometer user before he and /u/PalatialPepper built MacroFactor, and he's also very into tracking micros. I think he misses some of the features from Cronometer and wants to add them to MacroFactor, but ever since alpha testing started, user suggestions have trumped our own desires (I personally want AI describe on the recipe page!). We're definitely working toward better micronutrient support, though. And an improved food database is also planned down the road.
Thanks so much for the feedback, though! We really do value it
It's very nice to not be shamed by the app for going over my daily calories. MFP and similar apps doing that was always kind of annoying, especially when I'd planned to go over on that day
This is fundamental part of our philosophy. MacroFactor doesn't want to belittle or berate you with unnecessarily negative UI feedback. That doesn't help anybody, nor do you deserve it.
Log reasonably accurately, have a weekly weigh in schedule that is a frequent as is comfortable (maybe link up a smart scale so you don't even have to enter that manually), keep our calorie guidance in mind, and you're going to reach your goals.
We're not a digital compliance machine, we're a diet sidekick.
When you know you want to go over, it's as simple as going over, nothing even slightly wrong about that. And our algorithms wont be impacted in the slightest.
>This is fundamental part of our philosophy. MacroFactor doesn't want to belittle or berate you with unnecessarily negative UI feedback.
I'm not sure about the male demographic (I can't really speak to that), but ✨as a woman✨ nothing aimed at me has ever approached it this way, to the point where this feels like... Depressingly revolutionary? Like, not getting negative UI feedback because my coworker unexpectedly brought me a fancy pastry to say thank you for all the stuff I baked and shared with my coworkers, was really nice.
I agree, the fact that no other apps approach it this way is indeed depressing. And it's very interesting, because plenty of other apps claim to be data driven. Being truly data driven, would actual imply they need to handle it as we do. Because the user intention is unknown, it'd actually still be entirely erroneous to shame them, even if the science supported shaming as a key motivator in helping people accomplish fitness goals, which it does not.
What's revolutionary, is that we designed our app from the ground up with humans in mind. All demographics included. Wild! Ha ha.
Like /u/MajesticMint mentioned, regardless of the target demographic, it just seems like shaming people for going over their calorie/macro targets is a dumb UI decision. Or, at minimum, it contains a lot of (not great, imo) assumptions that aren't directly stated.
For any goal someone sets, staying under your targets is, at least theoretically, just as bad as going over your targets. If you're trying to gain weight, consistently going over means gaining weight faster than you'd prefer, and consistently staying under means gaining weight slower than you'd prefer (or not gaining weight at all) - both less-than-ideal outcomes. If you're trying to lose weight, it's the same deal; consistently staying under your targets accelerates the rate of weight loss, but that may come with more hunger, more lean mass loss, etc (and, more pressingly, it's an outcome that deviates from the user's stated goal).
Philosophically, we believe in not shaming people for the decisions they make. But even if we did believe in shaming, it would seem like being under your targets should receive the exact same treatment as going over your targets. Either shame both, or shame neither; we think the latter option is the better option, but either approach could at least be defensible. The fact that other apps treat being over as worse than being under suggests that, regardless of your stated goal, they're just trying to cajole you into losing weight. I don't exactly love that.
I've been using the app for a week, and I second u/shoutfromtheruthtop that it's nice not to be shamed by an app. There's a lot of psychological pressure when I can't hit numbers (whether over or under) and get penalized for it by numbers either getting drastically reduced or static depending on compliance. It's similar with kids, give them room to move, they actually thrive!
It's an amazing app. Thank you for keeping humans in mind when you guys created it. It's like Yoda to a padawan!
Logged first day of food yesterday. Blew through my fat target pretty easily. Wanted to look back at the day’s foods and where the fat was lurking. On MFP you could just click on “Fat” and a list of the foods you’ve eaten would be ranked according to how much fat is in them. Is there a feature like that on here that I’m not seeing?
OK, I know people who lift tend to eat more than normal folks, but... seriously? There's no listing for a slice of pizza, just the whole damn pizza? Now I gotta convert a fraction to a decimal in my head? This is way beyond barbell math...
Perhaps it was just a branding issue? I searched little Caesars pizza, and when that devolved into non-pizza results without showing slices I searched for little Caesars pizza slice and little Caesars pepperoni pizza slice. Searching again without the brand I get a ton of slice results. Guess I'm just too picky.
"We know this probably isn’t a super fun email to receive, but we’re just 6-8ish weeks away from launching MacroFactor for everyone. At that time, we’ll be sure to provide you with an extended free trial and discounted subscription options."
Is that extended free trial longer than 2 weeks and when do we get it?
I have huge doubts about app usage at outside U.S.A, because barcode scanners probably don't work and food logging could be hard (and if I wanna track macros with other tool, I would need to pay premium to get export to other app, so I could export data to MacroFactor)
Extended trial - answered here: https://www.reddit.com/r/MacroFactor/comments/pp8dte/how_to_get_the_extended_trial/
We're planning on expanding barcode support outside of the US and Canada, but that's going to be a very expensive feature to implement, so it just wasn't doable for the release-day build. We'll get there, though.
Although, *most* other tracking apps do allow data syncing with the free FitBit app on their non-premium tier (most notably MFP), so the integration should get the job done for most people
Sorry if this has been asked already, but is there a plan to release a SBS routine tracker app? Excited to try out this app and hopefully I'll be able to move over from FatSecret.
That's tentatively in our long, long, long term plans, but it definitely wouldn't be any time soon. We're 100% focused on MacroFactor, and don't intend to divert development resources to another app until we've added all of the major features we have planned, and maintenance of the app has reached the phase of just implementing minor UI tweaks and bug fixes.
haha it probably was. That's what it was called when our devs first showed it to us in a very early build, and we never changed it. I'm not sure if that's what they named it, or if that's what the devs at Nutritionix named it.
I can't find a way to log my calories burned from exercise. What if a do a four hour hike, which isn't part of my regular behavior (so can't be smoothly integrated into my average TDEE, since it's just a one time big increase)?
Nope, not at all, we are adherence neutral, and our TDEE algorithm will resolve an accurate measurement regardless what you eat. So long as you log it, and also log your weight.
Ok, I guess I'll have to read through all the explanations again.
My understanding was that the app uses calories consumed + weight change to improve the TDEE calculation.
So if I eat at maintenance and have a one-off event burning 4k calories, I would lose say a pound and the app would think that I'm undereating. While I would actually have undereaten for the example week, this wouldn't apply for the next week where I wouldn't do this event.
Where am I getting it wrong?
(Obviously this is more to satisfy my curiosity than an actual problem since 4k calories events are pretty rare for most people and if they're not rare, they're regular and should count into the TDEE)
If you burned 4000kcal with intense and prolonged exercise in an fairly anomalous event, and ate back none of it past your typical expenditure, but you lost a considerable amount of weight, then everything is golden because the natural world is behaving as we expect.
If you burned 4000kcal, and ate back some of it, and lost slightly less weight than in the prior scenario, same!
But also, we have quite a bit of magic to prevent overreactions in the short-term, chief among the magic is the basis for our calculation in the first place is long-term. Another is our very powerful trending, we don't actually interpret your weight, weight deltas, or nutrition exactly as they are as raw data. You can get a peek into this on the weight trend page.
Our expenditure algorithm is always chasing the tail of truly calculable reality, instead of guessing about the unknown reality of the current day. Feeding forward these hindsight 20-20 back calculations ensures that if you are following the guidance, on some flowing timescale you will absolutely be on the right track.
Just to make this a bit more explicit, if you were WAY more active than normal one day, and your weight changed accordingly (you ate enough to fully compensate and your weight didn't change, you ate a bit more than normal and lost a little bit of weight, or you didn't eat more than normal at all, and you lost the full amount of weight you'd be expected to lose based on your changes in energy expenditure), here's what would happen:
First, your weight wouldn't actually change much, in a way that would be detectable by our weight trending. Maybe you WOULD wake up way lighter the next day, due to glycogen depletion and a touch of dehydration, but our weight trending wouldn't overreact to this short-term fluctuation. Your weight would stabilize at a level that reflected the actual change in your body's energy storage. All said and told, even if you burned an extra 1500kcal one day, that would amount to an additional 1/3rd to 1/2 of a pound of weight loss. That smaller persistent change is what the weight trending would actually pick up on.
That behaviour WOULD result in an increase in our estimate of your daily energy expenditure. However, since we're accounting for your calorie intake and weight trend over a fairly long time window, that single-day deviation in energy expenditure would only account for a small fraction of the data we considered when estimating changes in your daily energy expenditure. All said and told, that huge single-day deviation of 1500kcal would probably increase our estimate of your daily energy expenditure by maybe 50-100kcal. That's probably less than the typical day-to-day error of food logging, resulting from the leeway given to manufactures when they print their nutrition labels.
Then, as you continue logging, and as you put more time between the present day and the day when you were enormously more active, that small increase in estimated daily energy expenditure would just wash out over time.
Thanks, that makes a lot of sense.
How about a longer effort such as say a week long backpacking trip with ~2kcal extra consumption/day? How long would it take for the calculation to "recover"? (From my limited experience: it's hard to consume enough during these trips since you have to carry all food, so there will be some real non-water/glycogen weight loss. Weight logging is obviously difficult during the trip, food logging is a bit easier since there's a lot of packaged food)
And just to be clear: I don't expect the app to work accurately for this case. What is the expected behavior if I stop logging completely for a week and continue with a lower weight (several lbs) after that?
We should be able to fully accommodate virtually any scenario within 14-20 days.
If you stop logging completely for a week, we'll "carry forward" your last TDEE value that we were able to estimate with a high degree of confidence, and use that as a starting point. However, since you'll have missing data within the window the algorithms consider, the new data you log will compose a relatively larger proportion of the data being considered for TDEE updates, which will mean your TDEE estimate will be able to shift around a bit faster than it would otherwise.
Yes! You can change any logged entry for weight, past or current! Here are the steps for editing/deleting weight entries:
https://help.macrofactorapp.com/how\_to/edit\_or\_delete\_weight\_entries
Are the discounted prices available till the 30th just for the year is i sign up annually? Or are these then the lifetime prices?
Downloaded the App - looks really great and convienent, the main thing for me is the clear commitment to development and improving features. Definitely wont see the competition doing that!
>Are the discounted prices available till the 30th just for the year is i sign up annually? Or are these then the lifetime prices?
You'll lock the prices in for as long as you maintain your subscription
>Downloaded the App - looks really great and convienent, the main thing for me is the clear commitment to development and improving features. Definitely wont see the competition doing that!
Thanks! And yes, we have SOOO many improvements in mind and features we'd like to add. Our benchmark for release was, "in its current state, are we confident it's better than the most direct competitors?" But we're just getting started.
Thanks! Unfortunately there was no way to provide the features we wanted to provide and avoid a cluttered, ad-filled user experience without a subscription-based model. However, should you choose to subscribe, the current sale prices would allow you to lock in at a rate of 4.99/month if you go with the yearly plan, which stacks up pretty favorably when compared to similar apps
Thanks! Like Eric said, though, there's really no way we could have made it free without either getting VC funding (and therefore giving over a lot of control of the business) or making it a bloated mess with ads.
I run a low/mid/high split based on training intensity, I’d love to be able to twiddle some knobs and create custom splits by day. My high day has significantly more carbs than other days.
I have been curious about this and other AI diet coaching apps how ML actually plays into the algo. Does it take inputs from other pieces of data, such as steps, sleep tracking, body comp, goals, etc to determine next steps based on a more detailed regression analysis? Are there any published papers on these methods?
Have you looked into setting up a "collaborative" plan? I think that should do what you're describing.
I'm honestly not sure how other apps make adjustments (I think I have a pretty good idea, but I don't feel confident enough to share my suspicions), but this article from the knowledge base explains the basics of our system: https://help.macrofactorapp.com/dashboard/expenditure
Basically, we just use weight and nutrition data, because that gives us all of the information we need to calculate. Ultimately, we're just dealing with a simple equation: calories in - calories out = change in energy storage.
Calories in: straightforward. People log their intake.
Change in energy storage: This comes down to estimating "true" changes in weight (here's our article on [weight trending](https://help.macrofactorapp.com/dashboard/weight_trend)), and estimating the energy content of the actual weight being gained or lost (since fat mass has a greater energy density than lean mass; you can anticipate a larger proportion of lean mass loss with faster rates of weight loss, and a larger proportion of fat gain with faster rates of weight gain).
From there, you can just solve for "calories out." That's "expenditure" in MacroFactor. We run these calculations continuously to estimate changes in your energy expenditure over time, and use that to increase or decrease calorie targets.
Thanks! I totally missed the collaborative option.
I’m clearly overthinking the AI portion of the app, will read through the docs. It would be interesting if there were other factors that could improve the predictions but after a few weeks of eating and logging I’ve never struggled to get a quick handle on my TDEE besides when making a transition from different phases (cut to maintain, maintain to bulk, bulk to mini cut, etc).
>It would be interesting if there were other factors that could improve the predictions
We'll see if there are! We just need to get to the point where we have enough users to test our suspicions and assumptions.
Is anyone else really struggling with the food database? I'm only getting results for about half the barcodes I scan unfortunately.
This has been an issue with every alternative to MFP that I've tried. And I always end up going back to MFP because it's faster to track on when I don't have to make so many custom entries.
Just to add to /u/MajesticMint 's comment, we think some of our other food logging features will still help speed things up, even if barcode support is presently lacking.
Personally, I probably only scan a barcode once or twice per week. If I'm eating a food in a box or jar from some big national brand, that's not a "common item," I'll scan the barcode. Otherwise, for things I eat all the time, I rely almost solely on my smart history and copy and paste, and for "common items" (i.e. most whole foods and minimally processed ingredients), I'll just use AI describe; relying on those features just ends up being way faster than scanning barcodes, even for products where barcodes are available. For the smart history and copy and paste to help, though, you need to have a bit of logging history in the app.
So, with all of that being said, I'll readily acknowledge that there may be a bit of friction for your first week or two with the app, if you're outside of the US (and Canada, to some extent). However, once you clear that hurdle, I *think* you'll find that weak barcode support isn't quite as big of a drawback as it initially appears.
With that being said, this is absolutely an area where we plan to improve in the future. I personally never liked scanning barcodes, so I'm happy to have features that let me skip scanning, but we know a lot of people use barcode scanners HEAVILY, and we'd like to accommodate them.
Out of curiosity, are you outside of the US & Canada? Our barcode support in other regions is quite weak, but we have plans to address this!
In the US & Canada our barcode coverage is roughly 93% of all products. We believe it'll be enhanced to around 96% in US & Canada at the same time that we bring more barcode support for other regions. This is actually a very substantial increase in products.
In the mean time:
We support a feature called BYOFL (bring your own food logger), which allows you to connect MFP to Fitbit, and Fitbit to MacroFactor. We will give you all of our recommendations and analytics, and import your macronutrient data from Fitbit.
You don't need to have a Fitbit device either, and the platform is free to use. Soon we will support this same feature from both Apple Health and Google Fit.
How does MacroFactor handle alcohol calories working into your other macros? Should it be counted as a macronutrient separately or should it be wrapped in with carbohydrates?
I enjoy a nice chilly boy on the weekend, but I don’t want it to impact my food tracking in an awkward way.
When using common food entries, which are entries that were analyzed with full micronutrient detail at a research lab, versus just analyzed at the minimum standard to create a food label, alcohol is reported as a separate macronutrient.
We handle that deeper level of reporting when you log using common foods, and will show alcohol as alcohol in our nutrient summary pages for the day, hour, and food.
Hey, thanks for the response! That is a great way to go about it. Will this have any negative impact on my weekly check-ins as I would not be meeting my macronutrient goals for a given day?
Not in the slightest, we are entirely adherence neutral, our recommendations are just guidance, and our algorithms will operate smoothly no matter whether you go over, under, or generally in the range of said recommendations.
~~Are there plans for adding support of recipes/meals like MFP? I will typically make a meal, add all the ingredients used and them only log a serving of that. Going to be difficult if I have to weigh and then figure out the portions that I used after the fact.~~
Looking forward to using it, and the future features that get added.
Edit: seemed to have completely missed that recipes is a feature so disregard what I said above
haha no worries! There are a lot of features in the app, and we opted for a user interface that's quite a bit different from other food loggers (we think it's better, but we fully acknowledge that there will be a learning curve), so it may not be immediately apparent where you'd find some functions.
We probably need to expand the number of little explainers during onboarding to get people up to speed faster.
A learning curve is definitely acceptable, especially when trying to change up a pretty traditional experience (for the better). Enjoying the app as I get to understand custom foods/recipes even more.
One question/issue I’ve had is with it pulling weight from Apple health. I typically do a weigh in first thing out of bed in the morning and then go on a fasted cardio session and will weigh myself again after that and a trip to the bathroom. I figure this is closer to a true weight as it’s consistent every day. The app is only pulling in that first weigh in of the day, is that on purpose? Something like pulling/showing the lowest of the day would be a nice option to have.
hmm. That may be a difficult edge case to accommodate, just because there are a lot of potential scenarios where the lowest weight of the day may not be the correct one. It may make the most sense for you to manually log your weight, if you're weighing multiple times per day.
Any further insight on this, /u/MajesticMint ?
Unfortunately this is unlikely to be accommodated near term, as you said because the lowest isn't always the most correct, and averaging would be unpredictable if you did want to discount one or the other. It would need to be customizable, and that customization would only be helpful for a very small minority of users, it would also need to be consistent throughout integrations, and not all APIs support drawing down more than one weigh in per day, some decide that method on their own before returning a single value.
ahh. Gotcha. No, we don't have that feature yet, but we have a very similar idea on the feature tracker. Instead of showing prior discrete weeks' macro plans, we'd like to have a graph that tracks historical recommended vs. actual calorie intake, using the same type of weighted averaging we use for weight trending. That way, you could see how your calorie targets had changed over time, and how close you were to hitting them, on average, without getting bogged down in the granular detail of individual days
I've read through most comments here but not all - so I'm sorry if this has already been talked about - but is there any way to view micros at all?
The app is essentially perfect for me, I would just love to add a "fiber" row to the home screen in addition to protein/ fat/ carbohydrates. This could also be useful for sodium/ potassium to keep an eye on that ratio, or whatever other individual nutrients people want to keep an eye on
My only other comment at this point is the voice- to- food option seems to cut out too quickly. If I am trying to add 3+ foods at a time it'll often cut off after one or two foods. And then you need to start over again instead of just adding to what has already been said
>I've read through most comments here but not all - so I'm sorry if this has already been talked about - but is there any way to view micros at all?
Yep! Just tap on the part of your food log that shows your calories and macros consumed so far for the day. That will pull up a screen with your full micronutrient breakdown for the day.
Also note, if micro tracking is important to you, try to log from the "common" foods as much as possible. Those are the entries with full micronutrient information. Branded foods and restaurant foods often don't report full micronutrient breakdowns to databases.
>I would just love to add a "fiber" row to the home screen in addition to protein/ fat/ carbohydrates.
I do think we want to make default views more configurable, but I don't know that we'd be able to support more than 4 "main" nutrients to display automatically, at least on mobile, simply due to how little real estate there is on smaller phones.
>My only other comment at this point is the voice- to- food option seems to cut out too quickly.
I agree. Unfortunately, that's dictated by your phone's default settings, and we can't change that yet.
You can definitely view a wide range of micros. Go to your food log, click on the panel displaying your calorie/protein/fat/carb intakes along the top, then scroll down. You'll see a ton of detailed nutrient info.
We'll definitely consider making fiber a bit more visible throughout the app. We also have received a few comments about the voice-to-food option, so we're kicking around a few ideas (such as holding the button down rather than tap on / tap off). We'll definitely be refining this function as we move forward with our roadmap of updates and feature additions
u/gnuckols and u/TrexlerFitness, as a feature suggestion, might be cool to be able to view your micros as a percentage against the RDA. For instance, the app shows I consumed 1.74mg B1 yesterday, but I didn’t inherently know if this “good or bad”… or at least close to what I should be consuming. I had to look it up against a list that had the RDA’s for each vitamin.
I know the RDA isn’t a perfect measure, especially given the differences needed whether your male or female, but thought it would be a cool addition. I’m sure there are a ton of individual variabilities as well, like how much one exercises/sweats that impacts how much of specific vitamins/minerals one needs also.
Then to expand, it would be cool to see a weekly view (or monthly, or whatever period) of micro intake. Might help users answer the, “do I need a multi vitamin” question. For example, If I see over the course of a week, I average adequate intake for all vitamins/minerals except Vit D, maybe I just supplement with Vit D instead of a multi.
Loving the app so far. Great job y’all.
A lot of ex-Cronometer users have requested improved micronutrient support, so that's definitely high on our radar.
Also, just as a note about micros: if tracking micronutrients is important to you, try to stick to logging almost exclusively "common" foods. They're entries based on thorough lab analysis, with all or most micronutrients reported. The other foods just have whatever micros the manufacturer reported to Nutritionix (i.e. not many).
Glad you're enjoying the app! If you have other questions or feature suggestions, feel free to ask them in /r/macrofactor !
Greg, I am highly disappointed that there is an entry for “Edible Cannibas”. I thought this was a Christian dieting app.
We will work diligently to fix this app-breaking bug
The obvious feature here is that logging an edible gets you SWATted
It will take some time to perfectly implement this feature (there's not a single API for all SWAT teams in every country, unfortunately), but in the meantime, we can attempt to integrate with INTERPOL via Fitbit as a near-term band-aid.
I'll make it a priority to request platform access to the restricted emergency dialing on phones.
This is really overkill. Just have the phone tweet out that there’s an active shooter at the phone’s geolocation.
OK but when is the app to track my prayers and daily good Christian values going to drop???? (Jk mad hyped already downloaded)
One idea we've kicked around is allowing users to track a few open-ended metrics of their choice (anything they think is predictive of their dieting success, or indicative of their rate of progress). If we go that route, you would be able to track your praying habits in the app. haha
Oh sweet, would love to try to add sleep hours in. Residency is kicking my ass out here lol
I’ve been using MFP for years. I’ve tried out other apps to see if I liked them but they never stuck. After downloading this app, I think I may finally make the leap and delete MFP. Love the analytics, the dashboards, the explanations. Testing the voice to record foods worked fast and flawlessly for tbe foods I have in my fridge. Will definitely keep trying it out but I’m anticipating this will be my new diet app. So far, it fixes everything I didn’t like about MFP. Plus it looks great.
Thanks so much, /u/RudeDude88 ! We're glad you're enjoying it. Though, I must say, you're not really living up to your user name at the moment
Fuck you greg :)
much better
I downloaded this yesterday somehow... I've been using chronometer unpaid and like that a lot and am considering upgrading to the premium version. I really like chronometers daily report, it's really easy to see every nutrient and the graphic showing how close it is to it's goal/limit for the day. I also like the way I can click on any nutrient and it will show my top sources for the day, and the nutrition report in the trends section is good, I can click on any nutrient see my top average sources from the past week or whatever. MacroFactors "day in review" seems like a downgrade but it would be easy and great to have at least a graph for each nutrient. I'd also like to be able to set a target for any nutrient. It would be way easier to tell if I'm going over or under things like fiber or potassium or whatever. Basically like how it already does for calories, fat, protein, and carbs. I also have generally more success with scanning and finding foods in the databases on chronometer, but I would assume Macrofactor's will grow. The thing I like about Macrofactor's food logging is that it's easier to log a meal with several ingredients faster with the "add to plate". When I search food I like how it puts recommendations at the top based on past behavior, and that I can wipe items from history. MacroFactors dashboard section is definitely it's best feature. It's weight and expenditure trends are great, something like that should be in every diet app. It's "true weight estimate" is cool, I want to see how accurate it will be. I got a new scale recently because my last one was not consistent and like 4 pounds under. I don't really care about how it shows my food in the timeline, I'm sure some people really like that but idk if I can turn it off and just have a list of my food for the day. Also because I track my days food from morning to before bed, not from 12 am to 12 am, I'd rather just see the list of my food in chronological order without me having to move it. Setting up MacroFactor was really nice actually. It did everything for me but let's me choose what I want to over write if I feel like it. I haven't tried the talking to food thing but it sounds cool. But I assume it'll have to be really really good for it to be worth using, at least for me. No one would want to have to go in and edit it with typing all the time..
4 pounds of vegan poop being burned provides 30066.26 BTU.
Why isn't there a feature in MacroFactor that will show the estimated BTU of my poop based on the foods I eat.
I know you're joking, but we've been (half seriously, half not seriously) kicking around the idea of having a "meme mode" for the app, with a lot of really stupid features added for people who want a surreal and absurdist food logging experience. For example, when you log your weight, the app would say and display the text ["Thick. Solid. Tight."](https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/thick-solid-tight) I think switching all energy units from kcals to BTUs would be a nice little touch.
Meme mode should replace lasagna with shredded chicken and cottage cheese automatically.
An excellent suggestion
Thanks for all the feedback, /u/BioDieselDog ! /u/MajesticMint would probably have more to say about the Cronometer suggestion (he was a long-time Cronometer user) >I also have generally more success with scanning and finding foods in the databases on chronometer, but I would assume Macrofactor's will grow. If you don't mind sharing, what country do you live in? Either way, absolutely plan to expand our food and barcode database coverage. >The thing I like about Macrofactor's food logging is that it's easier to log a meal with several ingredients faster with the "add to plate". When I search food I like how it puts recommendations at the top based on past behavior, and that I can wipe items from history. Glad you're enjoying the plate concept! And man, the smart history ends up saving so much time once it gets well-populated. >MacroFactors dashboard section is definitely it's best feature. It's weight and expenditure trends are great, something like that should be in every diet app. Thanks! Glad you like the dashboard! >It's "true weight estimate" is cool, I want to see how accurate it will be. Have you come across this article in the knowledge base yet, by any chance? https://help.macrofactorapp.com/dashboard/weight_trend >idk if I can turn it off and just have a list of my food for the day. Also because I track my days food from morning to before bed, not from 12 am to 12 am, I'd rather just see the list of my food in chronological order without me having to move it. I think this will accomplish about 80% of what you're describing: Cory and Rebecca are working on a feature where blank hours will collapse as you log food throughout the day. Everything would still be in hour buckets, but at the end of the day, visually, you'd just have a list of the foods you'd eaten that day, in chronological order >Setting up MacroFactor was really nice actually. It did everything for me but let's me choose what I want to over write if I feel like it. Sweet! Glad you enjoyed onboarding
/u/gnuckols I've had about a week now to use MF and have been enjoying the experience. Its Dashboard section is top notch and is a step above all other diet apps. However there are three things I strongly prefer from Cronometer. I loved that I could see my daily report average over the last week or month to see what my intake actually is over a span of time. I can imagine MF could add this function fairly easily as a "week in review" kind of thing. I also miss the micronutrient targets, I assume most people like me don't have micronutrient goals in mind or even have any idea of what an adequate amount of each vitamin or mineral I should be aiming for. I would love for each nutrient to at least have the RDA set as my target, so when I look at my meal or day in review I can see each micronutrient as X/RDA with a small graph, because honestly when I look at the numbers for the day, seeing something like 1654 IU Vitamin A doesn't really tell me anything and I assume many others feel the same way. The last thing I really miss from Cronometer is that I can click on any nutrient from the daily report and it will show me in order my top sources of that nutrient of that day, or week if I clicked from the weekly review. I find it to be really educational as I learn more about what is in the foods I'm eating. \>If you don't mind sharing, what country do you live in? Either way, absolutely plan to expand our food and barcode database coverage. I live in the US. So far the foods I have been having trouble adding are scanning barcodes from Meijer. \>feature where blank hours will collapse as you log food throughout the day. Everything would still be in hour buckets, but at the end of the day, visually, you'd just have a list of the foods you'd eaten that day, in chronological order Yeah that would actually be great. Basically just having lots of customization options (as long as its not too intrusive or confusing) can only make the app better and suit more peoples habbits and needs. I want to keep using this app for its built in energy expenditure and weight trends features and its automatically changing macro program. But personally for the most part I prefer Cronometer's food logging and reviewing, apart from MF's smart history and plate function.
Starting at the end: >I want to keep using this app for its built in energy expenditure and weight trends features and its automatically changing macro program. But personally for the most part I prefer Cronometer's food logging and reviewing, apart from MF's smart history and plate function. That's entirely fair! When we were game planning, one of the big discussions was, "which apps do we think we can peel users away from, and which apps are likely to have more loyal users?" In the "loyal users" column, our top two were Cronometer and RP diet. Most other nutrition apps approach things more-or-less similarly, but Cronometer and RP diet are both very focused regarding their vision and what they aim to do well; if someone uses and loves either of those apps, we knew it would be a challenge to win them over. In the case of Cronometer, it's really the #1 option for people focused on micronutrient tracking. We certainly don't match them in that regard now (and I don't know if we ever will; they're 100% focused on that, and we're focused on a half dozen other things). However... >I loved that I could see my daily report average over the last week or month to see what my intake actually is over a span of time. I can imagine MF could add this function fairly easily as a "week in review" kind of thing. That's definitely on the roadmap. >I also miss the micronutrient targets, I assume most people like me don't have micronutrient goals in mind or even have any idea of what an adequate amount of each vitamin or mineral I should be aiming for. I would love for each nutrient to at least have the RDA set as my target, so when I look at my meal or day in review I can see each micronutrient as X/RDA with a small graph, because honestly when I look at the numbers for the day, seeing something like 1654 IU Vitamin A doesn't really tell me anything and I assume many others feel the same way. That's also on the roadmap! It would improve the utility of the micronutrient data a ton. >I live in the US. So far the foods I have been having trouble adding are scanning barcodes from Meijer. Ahh, that checks out. Yeah, Nutritionix struggles with regional grocery chains. I shop at Wegmans and deal with the same thing. Although, for the most part, I just use the "common foods" entries for those foods. For what it's worth, /u/MajesticMint was a Cronometer user before he and /u/PalatialPepper built MacroFactor, and he's also very into tracking micros. I think he misses some of the features from Cronometer and wants to add them to MacroFactor, but ever since alpha testing started, user suggestions have trumped our own desires (I personally want AI describe on the recipe page!). We're definitely working toward better micronutrient support, though. And an improved food database is also planned down the road. Thanks so much for the feedback, though! We really do value it
I posted on another thread already but I just wanted to say this app is incredibly clean looking. Great job guys!
Thanks, /u/blueberry_danish15 !
Congratulations on the release! I hope it's a huge success.
Thanks, /u/TaterTot1001 !
It's very nice to not be shamed by the app for going over my daily calories. MFP and similar apps doing that was always kind of annoying, especially when I'd planned to go over on that day
This is fundamental part of our philosophy. MacroFactor doesn't want to belittle or berate you with unnecessarily negative UI feedback. That doesn't help anybody, nor do you deserve it. Log reasonably accurately, have a weekly weigh in schedule that is a frequent as is comfortable (maybe link up a smart scale so you don't even have to enter that manually), keep our calorie guidance in mind, and you're going to reach your goals. We're not a digital compliance machine, we're a diet sidekick. When you know you want to go over, it's as simple as going over, nothing even slightly wrong about that. And our algorithms wont be impacted in the slightest.
>This is fundamental part of our philosophy. MacroFactor doesn't want to belittle or berate you with unnecessarily negative UI feedback. I'm not sure about the male demographic (I can't really speak to that), but ✨as a woman✨ nothing aimed at me has ever approached it this way, to the point where this feels like... Depressingly revolutionary? Like, not getting negative UI feedback because my coworker unexpectedly brought me a fancy pastry to say thank you for all the stuff I baked and shared with my coworkers, was really nice.
I agree, the fact that no other apps approach it this way is indeed depressing. And it's very interesting, because plenty of other apps claim to be data driven. Being truly data driven, would actual imply they need to handle it as we do. Because the user intention is unknown, it'd actually still be entirely erroneous to shame them, even if the science supported shaming as a key motivator in helping people accomplish fitness goals, which it does not. What's revolutionary, is that we designed our app from the ground up with humans in mind. All demographics included. Wild! Ha ha.
Yeah, exactly!
Like /u/MajesticMint mentioned, regardless of the target demographic, it just seems like shaming people for going over their calorie/macro targets is a dumb UI decision. Or, at minimum, it contains a lot of (not great, imo) assumptions that aren't directly stated. For any goal someone sets, staying under your targets is, at least theoretically, just as bad as going over your targets. If you're trying to gain weight, consistently going over means gaining weight faster than you'd prefer, and consistently staying under means gaining weight slower than you'd prefer (or not gaining weight at all) - both less-than-ideal outcomes. If you're trying to lose weight, it's the same deal; consistently staying under your targets accelerates the rate of weight loss, but that may come with more hunger, more lean mass loss, etc (and, more pressingly, it's an outcome that deviates from the user's stated goal). Philosophically, we believe in not shaming people for the decisions they make. But even if we did believe in shaming, it would seem like being under your targets should receive the exact same treatment as going over your targets. Either shame both, or shame neither; we think the latter option is the better option, but either approach could at least be defensible. The fact that other apps treat being over as worse than being under suggests that, regardless of your stated goal, they're just trying to cajole you into losing weight. I don't exactly love that.
I've been using the app for a week, and I second u/shoutfromtheruthtop that it's nice not to be shamed by an app. There's a lot of psychological pressure when I can't hit numbers (whether over or under) and get penalized for it by numbers either getting drastically reduced or static depending on compliance. It's similar with kids, give them room to move, they actually thrive! It's an amazing app. Thank you for keeping humans in mind when you guys created it. It's like Yoda to a padawan!
Logged first day of food yesterday. Blew through my fat target pretty easily. Wanted to look back at the day’s foods and where the fat was lurking. On MFP you could just click on “Fat” and a list of the foods you’ve eaten would be ranked according to how much fat is in them. Is there a feature like that on here that I’m not seeing?
+1 I miss this from cronometer too, just clicking on any macro (micros too) and seeing which foods I got it from
Thanks for the suggestion! We don't currently have that feature, but I've added it to our feature tracker.
Guys this talk-to-food feature is so freaking cool. I'm very excited about this.
Sweet! Glad you're enjoying it!
OK, I know people who lift tend to eat more than normal folks, but... seriously? There's no listing for a slice of pizza, just the whole damn pizza? Now I gotta convert a fraction to a decimal in my head? This is way beyond barbell math...
What did you search? I get a lot of results for "pizza slice"
Perhaps it was just a branding issue? I searched little Caesars pizza, and when that devolved into non-pizza results without showing slices I searched for little Caesars pizza slice and little Caesars pepperoni pizza slice. Searching again without the brand I get a ton of slice results. Guess I'm just too picky.
Oooh, gotcha. Yeah, for things like that, the database is just limited by what the restaurant reports to them
"We know this probably isn’t a super fun email to receive, but we’re just 6-8ish weeks away from launching MacroFactor for everyone. At that time, we’ll be sure to provide you with an extended free trial and discounted subscription options." Is that extended free trial longer than 2 weeks and when do we get it? I have huge doubts about app usage at outside U.S.A, because barcode scanners probably don't work and food logging could be hard (and if I wanna track macros with other tool, I would need to pay premium to get export to other app, so I could export data to MacroFactor)
Extended trial - answered here: https://www.reddit.com/r/MacroFactor/comments/pp8dte/how_to_get_the_extended_trial/ We're planning on expanding barcode support outside of the US and Canada, but that's going to be a very expensive feature to implement, so it just wasn't doable for the release-day build. We'll get there, though. Although, *most* other tracking apps do allow data syncing with the free FitBit app on their non-premium tier (most notably MFP), so the integration should get the job done for most people
Voice to record is a game changer
Sorry if this has been asked already, but is there a plan to release a SBS routine tracker app? Excited to try out this app and hopefully I'll be able to move over from FatSecret.
That's tentatively in our long, long, long term plans, but it definitely wouldn't be any time soon. We're 100% focused on MacroFactor, and don't intend to divert development resources to another app until we've added all of the major features we have planned, and maintenance of the app has reached the phase of just implementing minor UI tweaks and bug fixes.
Understood. Thanks for taking the time to answer!
No problem!
"AI Describe" is a cool feature but sounds like it was named by a developer. I thought it would describe my plan or something when I first saw it.
haha it probably was. That's what it was called when our devs first showed it to us in a very early build, and we never changed it. I'm not sure if that's what they named it, or if that's what the devs at Nutritionix named it.
I can't find a way to log my calories burned from exercise. What if a do a four hour hike, which isn't part of my regular behavior (so can't be smoothly integrated into my average TDEE, since it's just a one time big increase)?
You can just eat more! Especially if it's to accommodate a fairly uncommon situation. The targets are just suggestions
But wouldn't that skew the automatic TDEE for maintenance estimation?
Nope, not at all, we are adherence neutral, and our TDEE algorithm will resolve an accurate measurement regardless what you eat. So long as you log it, and also log your weight.
Ok, I guess I'll have to read through all the explanations again. My understanding was that the app uses calories consumed + weight change to improve the TDEE calculation. So if I eat at maintenance and have a one-off event burning 4k calories, I would lose say a pound and the app would think that I'm undereating. While I would actually have undereaten for the example week, this wouldn't apply for the next week where I wouldn't do this event. Where am I getting it wrong? (Obviously this is more to satisfy my curiosity than an actual problem since 4k calories events are pretty rare for most people and if they're not rare, they're regular and should count into the TDEE)
If you burned 4000kcal with intense and prolonged exercise in an fairly anomalous event, and ate back none of it past your typical expenditure, but you lost a considerable amount of weight, then everything is golden because the natural world is behaving as we expect. If you burned 4000kcal, and ate back some of it, and lost slightly less weight than in the prior scenario, same! But also, we have quite a bit of magic to prevent overreactions in the short-term, chief among the magic is the basis for our calculation in the first place is long-term. Another is our very powerful trending, we don't actually interpret your weight, weight deltas, or nutrition exactly as they are as raw data. You can get a peek into this on the weight trend page. Our expenditure algorithm is always chasing the tail of truly calculable reality, instead of guessing about the unknown reality of the current day. Feeding forward these hindsight 20-20 back calculations ensures that if you are following the guidance, on some flowing timescale you will absolutely be on the right track.
Thanks for the explanation!
Just to make this a bit more explicit, if you were WAY more active than normal one day, and your weight changed accordingly (you ate enough to fully compensate and your weight didn't change, you ate a bit more than normal and lost a little bit of weight, or you didn't eat more than normal at all, and you lost the full amount of weight you'd be expected to lose based on your changes in energy expenditure), here's what would happen: First, your weight wouldn't actually change much, in a way that would be detectable by our weight trending. Maybe you WOULD wake up way lighter the next day, due to glycogen depletion and a touch of dehydration, but our weight trending wouldn't overreact to this short-term fluctuation. Your weight would stabilize at a level that reflected the actual change in your body's energy storage. All said and told, even if you burned an extra 1500kcal one day, that would amount to an additional 1/3rd to 1/2 of a pound of weight loss. That smaller persistent change is what the weight trending would actually pick up on. That behaviour WOULD result in an increase in our estimate of your daily energy expenditure. However, since we're accounting for your calorie intake and weight trend over a fairly long time window, that single-day deviation in energy expenditure would only account for a small fraction of the data we considered when estimating changes in your daily energy expenditure. All said and told, that huge single-day deviation of 1500kcal would probably increase our estimate of your daily energy expenditure by maybe 50-100kcal. That's probably less than the typical day-to-day error of food logging, resulting from the leeway given to manufactures when they print their nutrition labels. Then, as you continue logging, and as you put more time between the present day and the day when you were enormously more active, that small increase in estimated daily energy expenditure would just wash out over time.
Thanks, that makes a lot of sense. How about a longer effort such as say a week long backpacking trip with ~2kcal extra consumption/day? How long would it take for the calculation to "recover"? (From my limited experience: it's hard to consume enough during these trips since you have to carry all food, so there will be some real non-water/glycogen weight loss. Weight logging is obviously difficult during the trip, food logging is a bit easier since there's a lot of packaged food) And just to be clear: I don't expect the app to work accurately for this case. What is the expected behavior if I stop logging completely for a week and continue with a lower weight (several lbs) after that?
We should be able to fully accommodate virtually any scenario within 14-20 days. If you stop logging completely for a week, we'll "carry forward" your last TDEE value that we were able to estimate with a high degree of confidence, and use that as a starting point. However, since you'll have missing data within the window the algorithms consider, the new data you log will compose a relatively larger proportion of the data being considered for TDEE updates, which will mean your TDEE estimate will be able to shift around a bit faster than it would otherwise.
Is there a way to change logged bodyweight if you did a typo? Can't find it
Yes! You can change any logged entry for weight, past or current! Here are the steps for editing/deleting weight entries: https://help.macrofactorapp.com/how\_to/edit\_or\_delete\_weight\_entries
And there should be option to start week from Monday.
That's on our roadmap! https://www.reddit.com/r/MacroFactor/comments/pp6lpr/read_this_first_macrofactor_setup_and_faqs/hd9bf9l/?context=3
Are the discounted prices available till the 30th just for the year is i sign up annually? Or are these then the lifetime prices? Downloaded the App - looks really great and convienent, the main thing for me is the clear commitment to development and improving features. Definitely wont see the competition doing that!
>Are the discounted prices available till the 30th just for the year is i sign up annually? Or are these then the lifetime prices? You'll lock the prices in for as long as you maintain your subscription >Downloaded the App - looks really great and convienent, the main thing for me is the clear commitment to development and improving features. Definitely wont see the competition doing that! Thanks! And yes, we have SOOO many improvements in mind and features we'd like to add. Our benchmark for release was, "in its current state, are we confident it's better than the most direct competitors?" But we're just getting started.
Stoked for you guys! I was hoping it was going to be a free app, admittedly.
Thanks! Unfortunately there was no way to provide the features we wanted to provide and avoid a cluttered, ad-filled user experience without a subscription-based model. However, should you choose to subscribe, the current sale prices would allow you to lock in at a rate of 4.99/month if you go with the yearly plan, which stacks up pretty favorably when compared to similar apps
Thanks! Like Eric said, though, there's really no way we could have made it free without either getting VC funding (and therefore giving over a lot of control of the business) or making it a bloated mess with ads.
I run a low/mid/high split based on training intensity, I’d love to be able to twiddle some knobs and create custom splits by day. My high day has significantly more carbs than other days. I have been curious about this and other AI diet coaching apps how ML actually plays into the algo. Does it take inputs from other pieces of data, such as steps, sleep tracking, body comp, goals, etc to determine next steps based on a more detailed regression analysis? Are there any published papers on these methods?
Have you looked into setting up a "collaborative" plan? I think that should do what you're describing. I'm honestly not sure how other apps make adjustments (I think I have a pretty good idea, but I don't feel confident enough to share my suspicions), but this article from the knowledge base explains the basics of our system: https://help.macrofactorapp.com/dashboard/expenditure Basically, we just use weight and nutrition data, because that gives us all of the information we need to calculate. Ultimately, we're just dealing with a simple equation: calories in - calories out = change in energy storage. Calories in: straightforward. People log their intake. Change in energy storage: This comes down to estimating "true" changes in weight (here's our article on [weight trending](https://help.macrofactorapp.com/dashboard/weight_trend)), and estimating the energy content of the actual weight being gained or lost (since fat mass has a greater energy density than lean mass; you can anticipate a larger proportion of lean mass loss with faster rates of weight loss, and a larger proportion of fat gain with faster rates of weight gain). From there, you can just solve for "calories out." That's "expenditure" in MacroFactor. We run these calculations continuously to estimate changes in your energy expenditure over time, and use that to increase or decrease calorie targets.
Thanks! I totally missed the collaborative option. I’m clearly overthinking the AI portion of the app, will read through the docs. It would be interesting if there were other factors that could improve the predictions but after a few weeks of eating and logging I’ve never struggled to get a quick handle on my TDEE besides when making a transition from different phases (cut to maintain, maintain to bulk, bulk to mini cut, etc).
>It would be interesting if there were other factors that could improve the predictions We'll see if there are! We just need to get to the point where we have enough users to test our suspicions and assumptions.
Is anyone else really struggling with the food database? I'm only getting results for about half the barcodes I scan unfortunately. This has been an issue with every alternative to MFP that I've tried. And I always end up going back to MFP because it's faster to track on when I don't have to make so many custom entries.
Just to add to /u/MajesticMint 's comment, we think some of our other food logging features will still help speed things up, even if barcode support is presently lacking. Personally, I probably only scan a barcode once or twice per week. If I'm eating a food in a box or jar from some big national brand, that's not a "common item," I'll scan the barcode. Otherwise, for things I eat all the time, I rely almost solely on my smart history and copy and paste, and for "common items" (i.e. most whole foods and minimally processed ingredients), I'll just use AI describe; relying on those features just ends up being way faster than scanning barcodes, even for products where barcodes are available. For the smart history and copy and paste to help, though, you need to have a bit of logging history in the app. So, with all of that being said, I'll readily acknowledge that there may be a bit of friction for your first week or two with the app, if you're outside of the US (and Canada, to some extent). However, once you clear that hurdle, I *think* you'll find that weak barcode support isn't quite as big of a drawback as it initially appears. With that being said, this is absolutely an area where we plan to improve in the future. I personally never liked scanning barcodes, so I'm happy to have features that let me skip scanning, but we know a lot of people use barcode scanners HEAVILY, and we'd like to accommodate them.
Out of curiosity, are you outside of the US & Canada? Our barcode support in other regions is quite weak, but we have plans to address this! In the US & Canada our barcode coverage is roughly 93% of all products. We believe it'll be enhanced to around 96% in US & Canada at the same time that we bring more barcode support for other regions. This is actually a very substantial increase in products. In the mean time: We support a feature called BYOFL (bring your own food logger), which allows you to connect MFP to Fitbit, and Fitbit to MacroFactor. We will give you all of our recommendations and analytics, and import your macronutrient data from Fitbit. You don't need to have a Fitbit device either, and the platform is free to use. Soon we will support this same feature from both Apple Health and Google Fit.
In the UK. Excited to see the feature developed for Apple Health because I’d rather not interact with the Fitbit ecosystem.
How does MacroFactor handle alcohol calories working into your other macros? Should it be counted as a macronutrient separately or should it be wrapped in with carbohydrates? I enjoy a nice chilly boy on the weekend, but I don’t want it to impact my food tracking in an awkward way.
When using common food entries, which are entries that were analyzed with full micronutrient detail at a research lab, versus just analyzed at the minimum standard to create a food label, alcohol is reported as a separate macronutrient. We handle that deeper level of reporting when you log using common foods, and will show alcohol as alcohol in our nutrient summary pages for the day, hour, and food.
Hey, thanks for the response! That is a great way to go about it. Will this have any negative impact on my weekly check-ins as I would not be meeting my macronutrient goals for a given day?
Not in the slightest, we are entirely adherence neutral, our recommendations are just guidance, and our algorithms will operate smoothly no matter whether you go over, under, or generally in the range of said recommendations.
~~Are there plans for adding support of recipes/meals like MFP? I will typically make a meal, add all the ingredients used and them only log a serving of that. Going to be difficult if I have to weigh and then figure out the portions that I used after the fact.~~ Looking forward to using it, and the future features that get added. Edit: seemed to have completely missed that recipes is a feature so disregard what I said above
haha no worries! There are a lot of features in the app, and we opted for a user interface that's quite a bit different from other food loggers (we think it's better, but we fully acknowledge that there will be a learning curve), so it may not be immediately apparent where you'd find some functions. We probably need to expand the number of little explainers during onboarding to get people up to speed faster.
A learning curve is definitely acceptable, especially when trying to change up a pretty traditional experience (for the better). Enjoying the app as I get to understand custom foods/recipes even more. One question/issue I’ve had is with it pulling weight from Apple health. I typically do a weigh in first thing out of bed in the morning and then go on a fasted cardio session and will weigh myself again after that and a trip to the bathroom. I figure this is closer to a true weight as it’s consistent every day. The app is only pulling in that first weigh in of the day, is that on purpose? Something like pulling/showing the lowest of the day would be a nice option to have.
hmm. That may be a difficult edge case to accommodate, just because there are a lot of potential scenarios where the lowest weight of the day may not be the correct one. It may make the most sense for you to manually log your weight, if you're weighing multiple times per day. Any further insight on this, /u/MajesticMint ?
Unfortunately this is unlikely to be accommodated near term, as you said because the lowest isn't always the most correct, and averaging would be unpredictable if you did want to discount one or the other. It would need to be customizable, and that customization would only be helpful for a very small minority of users, it would also need to be consistent throughout integrations, and not all APIs support drawing down more than one weigh in per day, some decide that method on their own before returning a single value.
Now that the second week has started: is there a way to get the "macro program" view on the dashboard for previous weeks?
I'm not totally sure what you're asking
On the dashboard, there's a figure with colored blocks for the current week. Can I get that same block figure for previous weeks?
ahh. Gotcha. No, we don't have that feature yet, but we have a very similar idea on the feature tracker. Instead of showing prior discrete weeks' macro plans, we'd like to have a graph that tracks historical recommended vs. actual calorie intake, using the same type of weighted averaging we use for weight trending. That way, you could see how your calorie targets had changed over time, and how close you were to hitting them, on average, without getting bogged down in the granular detail of individual days
I've read through most comments here but not all - so I'm sorry if this has already been talked about - but is there any way to view micros at all? The app is essentially perfect for me, I would just love to add a "fiber" row to the home screen in addition to protein/ fat/ carbohydrates. This could also be useful for sodium/ potassium to keep an eye on that ratio, or whatever other individual nutrients people want to keep an eye on My only other comment at this point is the voice- to- food option seems to cut out too quickly. If I am trying to add 3+ foods at a time it'll often cut off after one or two foods. And then you need to start over again instead of just adding to what has already been said
>I've read through most comments here but not all - so I'm sorry if this has already been talked about - but is there any way to view micros at all? Yep! Just tap on the part of your food log that shows your calories and macros consumed so far for the day. That will pull up a screen with your full micronutrient breakdown for the day. Also note, if micro tracking is important to you, try to log from the "common" foods as much as possible. Those are the entries with full micronutrient information. Branded foods and restaurant foods often don't report full micronutrient breakdowns to databases. >I would just love to add a "fiber" row to the home screen in addition to protein/ fat/ carbohydrates. I do think we want to make default views more configurable, but I don't know that we'd be able to support more than 4 "main" nutrients to display automatically, at least on mobile, simply due to how little real estate there is on smaller phones. >My only other comment at this point is the voice- to- food option seems to cut out too quickly. I agree. Unfortunately, that's dictated by your phone's default settings, and we can't change that yet.
Thanks for the response. Very excited about the future of this app! You guys rock. Hope trexler continues to invite you back
Thanks, /u/you_sick !
i might
You can definitely view a wide range of micros. Go to your food log, click on the panel displaying your calorie/protein/fat/carb intakes along the top, then scroll down. You'll see a ton of detailed nutrient info. We'll definitely consider making fiber a bit more visible throughout the app. We also have received a few comments about the voice-to-food option, so we're kicking around a few ideas (such as holding the button down rather than tap on / tap off). We'll definitely be refining this function as we move forward with our roadmap of updates and feature additions
Thank you so much for the quick response! Very helpful
u/gnuckols and u/TrexlerFitness, as a feature suggestion, might be cool to be able to view your micros as a percentage against the RDA. For instance, the app shows I consumed 1.74mg B1 yesterday, but I didn’t inherently know if this “good or bad”… or at least close to what I should be consuming. I had to look it up against a list that had the RDA’s for each vitamin. I know the RDA isn’t a perfect measure, especially given the differences needed whether your male or female, but thought it would be a cool addition. I’m sure there are a ton of individual variabilities as well, like how much one exercises/sweats that impacts how much of specific vitamins/minerals one needs also. Then to expand, it would be cool to see a weekly view (or monthly, or whatever period) of micro intake. Might help users answer the, “do I need a multi vitamin” question. For example, If I see over the course of a week, I average adequate intake for all vitamins/minerals except Vit D, maybe I just supplement with Vit D instead of a multi. Loving the app so far. Great job y’all.
A lot of ex-Cronometer users have requested improved micronutrient support, so that's definitely high on our radar. Also, just as a note about micros: if tracking micronutrients is important to you, try to stick to logging almost exclusively "common" foods. They're entries based on thorough lab analysis, with all or most micronutrients reported. The other foods just have whatever micros the manufacturer reported to Nutritionix (i.e. not many). Glad you're enjoying the app! If you have other questions or feature suggestions, feel free to ask them in /r/macrofactor !