Your Macro Tracking App is Too "Dumb" for Real Fat Loss (or Muscle Gain) | Ep 299
Try MacroFactor for free with code WITSANDWEIGHTS.
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Meticulously tracking your food but still not seeing results? You're not alone—and it's probably not your fault.
Most calorie tracking and food logging apps are fundamentally flawed, using static formulas that never adjust to your body's changing metabolism.
When you sign up for MyFitnessPal, Lose It, or Chronometer, they calculate your calorie needs once and never revisit them, despite the fact that your metabolism constantly adapts to what you eat, how much you weigh, your activity levels, sleep quality, and stress.
This episode exposes why traditional tracking apps fail to deliver sustainable results and introduces the missing element: the feedback loop between what you eat and how your body responds. They are "dumb" apps, not "smart" apps.
Your metabolism isn't a fixed furnace burning the same amount of fuel day after day—it's a dynamic system that becomes more efficient during calorie restriction and changes as you lose or gain weight.
So use the right tool for the job if you want to lose fat and gain muscle!
Main Takeaways:
Traditional apps like MyFitnessPal, LoseIt, and Cronometer rely on static formulas that don't adapt to your body's changing metabolism
Your metabolism constantly shifts due to weight changes, activity levels, stress, sleep, and metabolic adaptation
Food tracking itself is valuable for awareness, but without a feedback loop that dynamically adjusts your targets, you'll eventually hit plateaus
Dynamic TDEE calculation analyzes the relationship between your actual calorie intake and weight changes to provide personalized recommendations
A "smart" tracking system becomes more accurate over time as it learns about your unique metabolism
Episode Resources:
Try MacroFactor for free with code WITSANDWEIGHTS.
Timestamps:
0:00 - Why most calorie tracking apps are failing you
3:05 - The problem with static TDEE calculations
6:18 - How your metabolism actually adapts over time
11:07 - Specific limitations of popular tracking apps
14:46 - Why you need dynamic "smart" TDEE calculation
21:14 - Implementing an effective tracking strategy
25:19 - How proper tracking changes your behavior
27:29 - Recap and recommendations
Why Your Food Tracking App Keeps Failing You
Have you ever tracked your food meticulously, staying under your calorie goals, only to see zero changes on the scale—or worse, see it move in the opposite direction? It's incredibly frustrating, demoralizing, and makes you wonder if your body is broken.
But guess what? It's probably not you; it's your calorie tracking app that's sabotaging your fat loss or muscle-building goals.
A Critical Flaw
The reason popular food tracking apps like MyFitnessPal, Lose It, and Cronometer aren't working for you boils down to one significant flaw: static calorie calculations. These apps rely on fixed formulas, usually based on the Mifflin-St Jeor equation, to determine your Total Daily Energy Expenditure (TDEE)—the calories your body burns daily.
The issue? Your metabolism isn't static—it's dynamic and adaptive. Here's what these apps typically overlook:
1. Metabolic Adaptation
Your metabolism changes as your calorie intake changes. Reduce your calories, and your body learns to burn fewer calories doing the same activities.
2. Body Weight Changes
As you lose weight, your body needs fewer calories to sustain itself, further decreasing your TDEE.
3. Daily Activity Fluctuations
Your daily activity can vary widely—one day you're hitting 10,000 steps, the next only 3,000. Your app doesn't automatically adapt.
4. Stress and Sleep
High stress and poor sleep quality significantly impact your metabolic rate, altering calorie expenditure.
5. Hormonal Cycles
For women, menstrual cycles can shift metabolism by up to 10%, a factor completely ignored by most static formulas.
Why Traditional Apps Just Aren't Smart Enough
When you sign up for an app, you input your age, weight, height, sex, and activity level. The app spits out a calorie goal and expects your complex biological system to fit neatly into this simplistic model. As a result, you're left hitting numbers that don't match your actual metabolic needs.
Even worse, apps like MyFitnessPal encourage eating back exercise calories, which are notoriously inaccurate and often lead to overeating.
What You Actually Need…
So, if static calculations are flawed, what's the alternative? The solution lies in dynamic tracking—a method that continuously adapts based on your real-time body data.
Think about it like a thermostat:
A dumb thermostat keeps the temperature at a set point regardless of external factors.
A smart thermostat adjusts based on current conditions, time of day, and user preferences.
Your tracking app needs the same "smart" technology—adjusting your calorie and macro targets based on your body's actual response.
The App We Recommend
At the moment, MacroFactor, created by the experts at Stronger by Science, is the only tracking app currently employing dynamic calculations. Here's how it differs:
Real-Time Metabolism Tracking: MacroFactor continuously analyzes your calorie intake and weight changes, adjusting your calorie targets weekly.
Adaptive Algorithms: It learns your body's response patterns over time, becoming more accurate the longer you use it.
Eliminates Guesswork: Whether your metabolism speeds up or slows down, the app adapts, ensuring you're always at the right deficit or surplus.
Making Dynamic Tracking Work for You
To leverage dynamic tracking effectively:
Consistent Logging: Track everything you eat daily, regardless of adherence.
Daily Weigh-Ins: Track your weight daily to capture accurate trends and fluctuations.
Avoid Manual Overrides: Trust the data-driven recommendations rather than adjusting based on perception.
Give It Time: Expect meaningful adjustments after 3-4 weeks as the algorithm learns your body's specifics.
Empowering Your Fitness Journey
Tracking isn't obsessive—it's empowering. It provides awareness of your nutrition habits, shows you how your body responds, and equips you with the knowledge to make effective adjustments.
If you've been frustrated by lack of results, your current tracking app is likely the culprit. Switching to a dynamic, personalized approach with MacroFactor can eliminate the frustration and finally align your efforts with real, measurable results.
Remember, successful body composition change doesn't come from trying to fit into generic formulas—it comes from understanding and responding to your unique, dynamic metabolism.
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Transcript
Philip Pape: 0:01
If you've been tracking your food religiously but your weight isn't budging, it's probably not your fault. Most calorie tracking apps use the same static formula, regardless of what's happening with your metabolism. They set a number once, or you have to set the number and never adjust it based on how your unique body responds. So today I'm exposing the critical flaw in nearly every popular food tracking app and showing you what actually works if you want sustainable fat loss or muscle gain, because, while tracking itself is valuable as a first step for awareness, most apps fail to close the loop, and once you understand this, you won't want to waste time with those apps ever again. Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that helps you build a strong, healthy physique using evidence, engineering and efficiency. I'm your host, philip Pape, and today is one of my favorite topics. We are looking at an often overlooked aspect of successful body composition change how most food tracking apps are sabotaging your progress by using static formulas that ignore your body's real-time metabolism. This is a really important topic because if you are stuck, if you are frustrated and you're tracking your food, there could be a very good reason why. Here's the scenario you are logging everything you eat, you're weighing your food. You're using my fitness power lose it or chronometer you never go over your calorie goal but the scale's not budging. Or you're trying to gain muscle, but you can't seem to either get past a hard gaining plateau or you end up eating too much and you gain excess fat, and this is frustrating. It's demotivating, it makes you feel like your body's broken. But today you're going to learn why this isn't your fault. I will explain why most and I mean most, as in every single one except one food logging apps are based on static, unhelpful formulas how your metabolism actually adapts to what you eat and why a dynamic approach that uses your real data in the right way is the only reliable method to maintain consistent progress.
Philip Pape: 2:15
Food tracking itself is incredibly valuable for awareness. It is step one for most people, but without a system that creates the feedback loop between your intake and your results, you are flying blind with the wrong targets. So if you're trying to lose those last five or 10 stubborn pounds, try to lose a lot more than that in terms of fat loss. You're trying to build muscle but not gain too much fat, or you're just trying to optimize your nutrition and figure out what the heck do I eat for my calories and macros understanding why your app's calorie recommendations may be way off are going to change how you think about this, and you're going to have the secret decoder ring by the time this episode is done, and I encourage you to listen through the entire episode, because I'm actually going to talk about specific apps that you're probably familiar with and I'm going to share the solution that will actually figure this out for you.
Philip Pape: 3:05
All right, so I want to start with a fundamental issue that affects virtually every mainstream food tracking app on the market right now. Until times change in the future, this is the case right now, and the problem is simple. Most apps use a static, one-time calculation of your total daily energy expenditure, or TDEE. In fact, some apps don't even calculate that for you. For those unfamiliar, tdee represents the total calories you burn in a day. It is your metabolism, and it includes all the components of your metabolism your basal metabolic rate, which is the energy needed to keep you alive, calories burned by digesting food, your daily activity, both formal and informal, and everything you do.
Philip Pape: 3:47
And when you first sign up for an app like MyFitnessPal, lose it Chronometer and yes, I am naming names so that you know why these apps cannot cut it for what you're trying to achieve. When you sign up, they ask you some questions your age, your height, your weight, your sex, your activity level, your weight loss goal things like that which most apps are going to ask. Some don't even ask that and then they plug the values into a formula it's typically the Mifflin-St Jor equation or something similar and then it spits out a calorie target and then this becomes your daily goal. The app then expects you to consistently lose weight if you stick to the goal. But the fatal flaw is that these estimates, these calculations, are the exact kind you can get when you plug your information into an online calculator. I even have one on my website, and they're based on the average of the population and wildly inaccurate self-assessments of activity level. And yeah, they're the best we can do as far as an average, but they could be way off from your real metabolism up to 400 calories in either direction, and that's assuming you even give it the most accurate information for you. For example, the activity level is highly subjective. What does that mean? And even worse, the targets just remain fixed unless you manually update the information, so the apps don't automatically adjust based on what's actually happening with your body and what your eating patterns are.
Philip Pape: 5:08
So think about this have you ever been diligently tracking your calories and trying to stay under certain targets? Let's say you're trying to lose weight, lose fat, and it just doesn't happen. You just stay there, stay there, stay. Maybe you start gaining weight and it just seems like a mystery and you think, okay, it's me, it's my metabolism, and the app keeps telling you you should be losing weight and you're hitting the targets and maybe maybe you missed the target by five calories or two grams of protein. And then it gives you a big red number and it shames you for it. Right. And then your reality tells a different story from what the app says it should be and this creates a disconnect that is really harmful. It is really harmful for lots of things for body image, for your psychological state.
Philip Pape: 5:49
Through this process, you get to the point where you think tracking is a terrible tool, or it's obsessive or it's not helpful. To be clear, tracking your food is still a valuable practice. Even if you just track stuff on a piece of paper old school, and saw how much and what you eat, it's going to create awareness of the amounts, how much protein problem areas. Are you getting enough fiber? All of that stuff and that gives you data to work with for sure. It is extremely important.
Philip Pape: 6:18
The issue is not with the tracking itself. It's how most apps fail to create the feedback loop between what you track and what actually happens with your body. And again, I made this episode and I'm hoping to be able to share this with anybody in the future who wonders about the apps or anybody who says, well, I use chronometer, so I'm good, it should work. Right? No, it's not gonna work. And to understand why? To understand why these static calculations fail, we have to appreciate how adaptive and responsive our metabolism truly is. Your metabolism is not this fixed furnace burning the same amount of fuel day after day. Right, it's a dynamic system and it's adjusting to many, many, many things.
Philip Pape: 7:02
It adjusts your calorie intake first and foremost. That is probably the biggest factor. People don't realize this. The amount you're eating and whether you are losing or gaining weight are the top two. So number one the amount you're eating. When you reduce calories, your body becomes more efficient. It's going to burn fewer calories to perform the same function. This is an adaptation that occurs because you are starving of resources. And the opposite happens when you eat a lot more, your body actually ramps up. That's the big one. The second factor is weight loss. As you lose weight you have less mass to maintain, so your calorie needs naturally decrease. So you've kind of got this double whammy Adaptation combined with being lighter on the scale, because, just simple math, 180-pound person's gonna burn more calories at rest than 160 pound person with otherwise identical stats, not even counting muscle mass here we're just talking short term.
Philip Pape: 7:48
Number three is your activity level. You know your activity varies every day, just unconsciously, in terms of your steps. Some days you might walk 12,000 steps, other days barely 3000. Some days you might do cardio, some days you lift. They go all over the place. Sometimes you're doing too much cardio and that causes a negative adaptation or you burn fewer calories. It's highly subjective to that. The number fourth factor and these are really two factors, but I like to combine them as stress and sleep Sleep deprivation, poor sleep, restless sleep and or high stress, chronic stress can absolutely alter your hormone balance and your metabolism and they change how efficiently your body uses energy.
Philip Pape: 8:27
And so when you don't get enough sleep, you burn fewer calories. When your cortisol is all over the place. Because of your stress, you burn fewer calories. And then the last factor here is for women their hormonal changes throughout the month because of the menstrual cycle can also affect your metabolic rate by as much as five to 10%. It's not nothing. And even if you don't account for that, you still have all these other factors that cause your metabolism to fluctuate. So these create a constantly shifting energy expenditure that a static formula can't capture. Even if it's accurate for you on one day, it can be off by 600 calories two months from now. That's how bad it is.
Philip Pape: 9:04
And the problem is the traditional apps do exactly that. They provide a fixed target based on this fixed assumption and they expect that your complex biological system is going to conform to their mathematical model in some magical way. Or they make it even worse by having you input your activity or connect to your wearable, and they count back the calories from activity, which makes it even worse. I'll just give you a real world example that I see all the time with clients. I see it with myself in a fat loss phase. When someone starts a fat loss phase, they might have a TDEE of 2,500 calories that's your maintenance calories but after you lose, say, 10 pounds over a couple months, the TDEE could have dropped to 2,200 calories. Could have dropped by 300 or 400 or 500 calories. I've seen big drops because of the reduced body mass and the metabolic adaptation. And so if your deficit was 500 calories because you wanted to lose a pound a week, well, now you're actually in a lower deficit. You're only in a 200 calorie deficit because you didn't change your calories, but your body's burning fewer calories and so your weight loss is going to slow. By what? 60%? And these apps never tell you this is happening. You just don't know.
Philip Pape: 10:13
It keeps recommending the same target or maybe says, hey, what do you want your targets to be, despite clear evidence that your body's adapted right, which the evidence is that you stop losing weight. But then it's frustrating because you're saying, well, the app says I should be so, now something's wrong. And so you get frustrated, even if you're perfectly adhering, and the same issue occurs in the opposite direction. I'm not going to pay too much attention to that here today. I want to focus more on fat loss. But same thing If your app tells you you've got to eat 3,000 calories for a lean bulking phase, but your TDEE is less, you're going to gain a lot faster or, on the flip side, if it's more, you're going to hard gain and so it's even more precise in muscle gain in terms of the data that you need about yourself, because it's a little bit more sensitive up there. So, without this feedback loop that connects your intake to your results, you are just navigating with a broken compass. That is it.
Philip Pape: 11:07
So let's look at the actual most popular tracking apps that are on the market today and how their flawed methodology impacts your results, because I have to be honest, I don't like them. I think they are harmful. Not only do I think they're not helpful, I think they are harmful If your goal is to use the data to then accurately change your behaviors to get the goal you want. If your goal is strictly to log your food for awareness and that's it fine, they're adequate. But for any more than that which, if you're listening to the show, your goal is to improve your body composition these apps will not do them, period. And I want to be crystal clear I don't care about the cost, I don't care about the features, none of that. They just don't do it.
Philip Pape: 11:46
Let's start with the big one MyFitnessPal. Myfitnesspal it has a huge food database. Of course, a lot of it's inaccurate because they're user entered, but let's put that aside. The calorie calculations are problematic because the app asks you for your information when you set up and it never revisits it. It just doesn't consider how your metabolism changes, like we talked about, and then it separates exercise calories from your baseline metabolism, which is even worse, in my opinion. When you log a workout, it adds those calories to your daily budget, which encourages you to eat them back. This is dangerous. This is unhelpful and harmful, physically and psychologically, right? Number one, because exercise calorie estimates are just completely wrong. They're inaccurate. They're often off by 30 to 50%. Number two it doesn't account for how your body compensates for exercise, which is gonna happen and also the hunger that ramps up. And then it treats exercise as completely separate from your energy expenditure, rather than just one of many components of it. Remember, your metabolism is complex. It's comprised of lots of things. Activity is just one tiny thing and, by the way, exercise comprises maybe 5% of your metabolism. So that's MyFitnessPal.
Philip Pape: 12:55
Then we get to Lose it, which is similar to MyFitnessPal. It uses a static TDEE calculation based on your user-reported activity level. It tells you go ahead and select a weight loss rate and then it gives you a fixed target to supposedly achieve the rate, but it doesn't adjust it. If you're eating exactly what it recommends but you're losing weight slower than expected, the app doesn't say oh, this might not be a big enough deficit for, or it might not be low enough calories for you. It just doesn't recognize that. That's a discrepancy. It's dumb Effectively, in my title the word dumb here means lacks intelligence, lacks smarts to do anything helpful. And then you're left wondering why you're not hitting your targets, despite even perfect compliance. And then we have chronometer. Everybody loves chronometer because it has this awesome micronutrient tracking. Fine, it still relies on static formulas like Mifflin, st Jor. You manually set your activity level. The app does not adjust your calorie targets based on real time weight changes or intake real-time weight changes or intake and so even when you update your weight, it just recalculates using the same formula rather than analyzing the relationship between intake and changes in weight.
Philip Pape: 14:01
We have a couple other apps out there that people like to mention. One is FatSecret, the other is HealthifyMe, and same limitations one-time calculations, they don't adapt, they require manual updates, they don't incorporate feedback loops from real world data, and so the pattern across these is clear. I mean, that's the extent of the details I want to get into, because this is not a feature comparison episode. This is calling out the one thing missing from every single app on the market, except one we're going to get to in a second. They rely on a theoretical calorie need rather than your body, so they're good for awareness of what you're eating, but they don't close the loop, so it's good for a few weeks and after that, useless, in my opinion, again, other than just awareness of what you're eating, and that is the key difference between failure and success.
Philip Pape: 14:46
So we've established that you don't just need a static calculation. What do you need instead? Well, you need a dynamic calculation, an approach that refines your energy expender estimate based on what's happening with your body. So think of that as the difference between dumb and smart technology. A dumb thermostat stays at the temperature you set it right, and that's how thermostats were for decades. A smart thermostat will learn your preference, they'll adapt to changing conditions. They might even have a schedule, and they'll adjust to the current temperature, time of day and so on to maintain optimal comfort. Traditional tracking apps are like dumb thermostats they set a target and they never adapt. What we need is a smart tracking app that closes the feedback loop between the intake and the results, between the intake and the results.
Philip Pape: 15:34
So what would that look like? Well, first, it would analyze the relationship between what you eat that's, your calorie intake and how your weight changes. Think about it your body is like a closed loop energy system. You take an energy in the form of food, you expend it in the form of lots of things movement, digestion, training and, as a result of what you do and just how you are, your body burns a certain amount of calories, and that causes your weight to either go up or down, based on how much energy you need to store, based on the net difference of energy. That's it. That's the first thing. The second thing it should do is create an algorithm based on your response. So not only should it take the data and estimate your expenditure, it should also look at it over time and take your history to even better estimate your expenditure. The third thing it should do is then give you targets based on that data. Sounds simple, right? Here's your calories and macros. The calories are what you need to be in the deficit. You want to lose the fat that you want at the rate you want. That's what's missing from the other apps. And then it should also become more accurate the longer you use it, as it collects data Like, for example, as you're gaining muscle, as you're gaining weight to build muscle, it can tell the ratio of muscle to fat based on how fast you're gaining, and then it can adjust for that.
Philip Pape: 16:48
So what app does this? If you follow this show for any length of time, you know what app it is. It's called Macrofactor, all in word, created by the guys at Stronger by Science. I'm a firm believer in this app because the only tool it's kind of like a barbell it is the best tool and the only tool for the job out there to do this as effectively as possible. The only alternative would be to do it on your own in a spreadsheet, which, if you want to, if you nerd out on it, if you can come up with a decent algorithm, go for it. I would rather take years and years of the smartest guys in evidence-based training, nutrition and science, who have analyzed both the physiological side as well as the statistical and algorithmic side, and put it into an app.
Philip Pape: 17:27
So, macro factor, all one word. And here's how it works. It doesn't just ask you to pick an activity level and enter your data. You do that initially. It gives you initial estimate, like every other app, but then the magic starts, because it looks at what happens when you eat a certain amount of food over time to your weight. How does your weight respond to your food? And so it is kind of like having an old style macro coach right, the old old nutrition coaches that calculated macros for you and I've talked about this before in negative terms, in that we don't need them anymore. You've got apps and you've got AI and everything else that can do that for you. That's easy. What you need a coach for is the human part, the psychological part, the supporting accountability. We're not going to get into that. I talked about that recently in a bonus episode.
Philip Pape: 18:12
But macro factor is like an old school macro coach who's just looking at how your weight changes and saying, okay, you're, you're starting to plateau. That means your deficit is smaller than we thought and therefore you're not burning as many calories, so we're going to give you lower calories. That's it. It adjusts up and down as your expenditure changes. So a concrete example of how this works in practice let's say, you begin tracking at what you believe is a 500 calorie a day deficit to lose a pound a week and after two weeks the app set notices that you've only lost a half a pound. Now again, this is over time based on averages. It's not going to do this very quickly, day to day and over respond. It's going to look at your trends over two, three, four weeks but it's saying okay, you're really only losing half a pound over the past few weeks, should be losing a pound, and a traditional app like MyFitnessPal would have no clue, just keep giving you the same deficit until you change it. But Macrofactor will recognize that your TDEE is actually lower than it thought and now it will adjust your intake to reach your fat loss desired rate of loss. And then it's going to update the calories and macros when you quote, unquote, check in with the app. So you check in weekly, usually on a Monday.
Philip Pape: 19:22
That's the default and the formula now no longer matters. The estimate, the initial estimate, no longer matters. What matters is you, your body, and the beauty of this approach is it works regardless of whether your metabolism is faster or slower, whether you've eaten more or less, whether you're hitting the targets or not, it's going to work. And if you are someone who naturally burns way more calories, it's going to detect this, and vice versa If your metabolism is slower, it's going to adjust downward accordingly. And so if you've been stuck trying to lose weight for years and years, or maybe you're peri-post-menopause, maybe you're an older dude who's just been stuck trying all the diets, this could be what you're missing Just an understanding of your metabolism, an approach that adapts as you are trying to change your body, because those things are cyclical.
Philip Pape: 20:05
As you change, your metabolism changes, but then you need to change again in terms of your eating habits, and so the app detects these changes and then adjust your targets. It seems simple, but I'm surprised that no other app does this, and it works in fat loss, maintenance or muscle gain. In fact, macrofactor has some pretty sophisticated algorithms for muscle gain. If you're trying to gain weight, it's going to give you a target, but then, if you go faster or slower than it expects, it doesn't just adjust the target blindly. It actually estimates a ratio of muscle and fat to determine how fast you need to go to gain at the rate you want to gain. It's pretty cool. So that's really all I have to say about dynamic calculation. I mean, it's again. It sounds simple Take what you eat and how your weight changes and calculate the number.
Philip Pape: 20:48
If you try to do this yourself, it's actually pretty sophisticated, because what if you're going from a bulk to a cut? What if you're sick or injured and your metabolism changes drastically? What if you have a period, your period and your cycle changes? There's a lot of reasons our expenditure can change. The app is not going to overcorrect. If you try to do this on your own, you're going to find out that there's all these little scenarios that are kind of difficult to deal with and you're going to have to update your algorithm, and so it gets more and more sophisticated.
Philip Pape: 21:14
So if you want an effective tracking strategy and this is not just tracking, this is tracking and the right targets, first you've got to select the right tool for the job. If you want to get super strong, you're probably going to select a barbell or at least some effective machines. So in this case, you want an app that uses a dynamic calculation period. Right now on the market, macrofactor is the only app that does this, and its algorithm is amazing, and they talk about it openly and transparently and they're constantly improving it. So it's going to improve every week. It's going to adjust your metabolism and give you the right targets.
Philip Pape: 21:46
Number two you've got to be consistent with your logging. So this isn't all just the app doing the job right. You don't just start using the app and, oh, I lose weight. No, of course you have to have accurate data. You want to log what you eat every day, whether you go over your target or not. So I have clients who, early on, they'll say, oh, I didn't track for a week because I got sick. And my response is well, assuming the tracking itself isn't stressful and it only takes like two minutes a day to track when you get used to it especially macro factor Cause it's so fast Keep tracking Even when you're sick again, if it doesn't make it worse. But again, for most people it's an easy, quick thing. And what's nice about tracking no matter what happens whether you're over or under your targets, not eating doesn't matter is it will have precision and accuracy to show you what happens to your body in those times. I actually want you to track in the times that are off plan. So quote, unquote, so we can see what happens to your expenditure in those times. You could adjust accordingly and you get honest data to create that feedback loop so that you have confidence on how much to eat, what to eat and when.
Philip Pape: 22:49
You also have to weigh yourself consistently. So I've talked before about how weighing every day is associated with success and maintaining your results. It is not associated with obsessiveness, because when you weigh every day, you can see the natural fluctuations caused by things that have nothing to do with fat. Weigh every day, you can see the natural fluctuations caused by things that have nothing to do with fat, and then you have to take a trend of that over time. So, like macro factor uses a 20 day exponential moving average, you don't have to understand what that means, but if you think of the 20 days, that's about three weeks. That means fat gain, fat loss, is really only estimated with any precision after about three weeks of data. The next thing is you have to understand that there are lots of things other than fat that will cause your weight to change. So, again tying into the comment I just made about daily weight tracking, we have water retention, sodium intake, carbohydrate levels, hormonal cycles, inflammation from training. Again, what matters is the trend over weeks.
Philip Pape: 23:44
The next thing is you don't want to manually override the calculations. So this is another problem I see is that some people will say, well, it says the expenditure is lower than I like, or I don't think my expenditure is that low and you're like tempted to manually change it. Well, once you've been using the app for I'll say, three or four weeks maybe as little as two, but usually three or four weeks of daily food tracking where you log everything you can't do partial days or it'll think you ate less and daily weighing it's going to have a pretty darn accurate assessment of your expenditure and if it's lower than you like, that's a reality you have to face. But that's a great thing because it's empowering data and it could explain why you've been stuck trying to lose weight or fat all these years, and then you could decide what to do about it. You also have to give these things time. I've mentioned this a couple of times.
Philip Pape: 24:30
Dynamic calculation is going to become more accurate the longer you use it. So the first few weeks you almost can't trust anything because you don't have enough precision, but by, say, four to six weeks, the algorithm is highly personalized and then, of course, course, you would use this as a learning tool. That is really my last comment on this is it's not just hitting targets which, by the way, macro factor doesn't judge you on whether you're over or under, it doesn't color code things, it's completely adherence neutral. It's very nice, it's very good for the psychological aspect, but beyond just hitting targets, you can pay attention to how different foods affect your hunger, your energy, your performance and, yes, your expenditure, and tie it all together right. The goal isn't just to comply to numbers. The goal is really to understand your body's unique response to what you do, what you eat, and then adjust accordingly.
Philip Pape: 25:19
And that's why, as a coach, I really love that my clients use it, because we get far more precise and insightful data than a traditional macro meal plan coach would ever have. And then I can go to that next level of being a detective and helping you understand why the data is doing what it's doing. And that eliminates guesswork. It eliminates the frustration from using MyFitnessPal, tracking your food and not knowing why you're not getting the result. Instead of wondering and being constantly frustrated, you're going to have a system that reflects your body's reality and creates a continuous feedback loop, and that's how we make progress in life, in fitness, in nutrition, everything the cool thing about tracking in general so just to throw a bone to any of these apps where you've decided to track your food and you weren't before is it will start to change your behavior, sometimes in ways you don't notice.
Philip Pape: 26:08
Research shows that people who track their food just track tend to move more throughout the day. They tend to make slightly better food choices, even when they're not consciously trying to. It's why I love having my clients track from day one, so that they start to change their own behavior. Listen, I have clients reach out to me in the first few weeks and they're like I just noticed this, so I changed this. I just noticed I didn't have no protein, so I did this. I'm not even telling them to do this stuff Right, and that's great, because a lot of this is on you, and I don't mean that in a bad way.
Philip Pape: 26:35
I mean you've got the power. It's you've. You take the action. But it really helps to have someone looking over your shoulder to understand why the data is doing what it's doing, so you can take the right actions. And then you take this to the next level not just track your food, but track your expenditure so that you can measure your actual response to food while you're tracking. It's really a profound shift in thinking. It's from trying to conform to what you think is how many calories you're burning, based on a formula, to actually observing and working with what your metabolism is doing. And if you went back 10 years before Macrofactor existed, the way someone would tell you to do this is to manually track your food and manually track your weight and kind of guess and eyeball how your weight is changing to your food. But it's very rough, it's very imprecise, and so that's why I recommend Macrofactor, which then gives you not a dumb tracking app but a smart system that closes the loop.
Philip Pape: 27:29
So anyway, we've covered a lot of ground today and just to bring it all together, the traditional apps my fitness pal lose it chronometer. They have static metabolism formulas that remain fixed regardless of how your body responds. So don't tell me when I suggest using macro factor. Oh no, I don't need to do that, I already use chronometer, it's free, Like, okay, well, you're, you're tracking food and that's it. You're not going to get the result you want without knowing what's actually happening in your body Period. They ignore metabolic adaptation, they fail to account for how your weight changes. They fail to account for energy changes and exercise changes and all of that. They're dumb in a world where you need smart. So even if you've been following your app's recommendations but you're not seeing the results, it's not because you are doing something wrong. It's because you have the wrong targets. So if you want to experience a difference and this is what the only little sales pitch I'm going to make here is to go ahead and try macro factor for free for two weeks. Link is in the show notes. Use my code wits and weights all one word.
Philip Pape: 28:25
I personally have used the app since the day it came out. All my clients, everyone in Physique University, use the app. It is highly empowering. It's going to change your life. It is a paid app and yet what you get for it is worth multiples upon multiples of the cost. I think it's still $71.99 for a year. Now, that's in US dollars. But try it for free using the code witsandweights all one word. Link is in the show notes.
Philip Pape: 28:48
I also have a step-by-step YouTube video that shows you how to set it up properly to find your true maintenance calories the first time. So I'm going to include links to both in the show notes. Grab the app, try it out. You've got two weeks to try it out. If you don't like it, no risk, don't use it and watch my video on setting it up and you're going to be good, you're going to be awesome. Then you're going to be reaching out saying, okay, cool, now I see what you were talking about.
Philip Pape: 29:11
Now I understand my true targets. Now I need to put this into the next level, combining it with my training, with my meal timing, making sure it works for me, with my biofeedback and my energy, and really get the fat loss that I'm going for. But step one is to start tracking your food and weight using Macrofactor. Use my code, wits and Weights, Get the link in the show notes and watch the video. All right, until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights and remember successful body composition change, fat loss, muscle gain, whatever it is, comes from understanding how your unique metabolism is changing, not trying to conform to a generic, static, unchanging formula. This is Philip Pape and you've been listening to Wits and Weights. I'll talk to you next time.
