How to Quickly Add Macros to Any Food Tracking App
If you keep track of what you eat, most foods are fairly straightforward: you either search for what it is (like four ounces of chicken breast), scan a barcode, or select a product name from an app search. What if you eat something that is not in the database, though, but you have the right nutrition labels in front of you? Here’s a trick that can make this task easier.
Some apps (like the premium version of MyFitnessPal) let you “quickly add” calories, carbs, protein and fat without the hassle of creating your own meal. But if your app doesn’t support this, try this.
Prepare three custom foods: Carbs, Proteins, and Fats. The exact directions will differ from application to application, but you want to do something like this:
- Create a new custom meal.
- Call it carbohydrates.
- Name the serving type “gram”.
- Enter its information as 4 calories, 1 gram of carbs, and leave the rest as zero.
- Repeat the process for protein (4 calories) and fat (9 calories).
If you want an even more granular product, you can create a “fiber” entry of 2 calories per gram (if you do, remember to add net carbs with your usual “carbohydrates” entry and fiber with “fiber”). Alcohol is 7 calories per gram if you want to add that, but alcoholic beverages usually don’t have calorie labels consistent with this approach.
We found this tip on the MacroFactor subreddit , as MacroFactor is a new app that doesn’t have a quick add feature yet. But works with any application; the screenshots above show how it looks in Cronometer. (However, the Cronometer database has a quick addition of carbs feature, and it works the same way, so you don’t even have to create entries yourself.)
Some apps have a quick add feature, but this is hidden behind a premium subscription (MyFitnessPal allows you to quickly add calories in the free version, but requires premium to add macros quickly). So give it a try if you’re using any app that doesn’t otherwise have the quick add feature.