Best Paid Diet App (and Best Free Alternatives)
MacroFactor is a weight and food tracking app that does what I do with three different free apps. Don’t worry, I’ll tell you what these apps are and how to set them up if you want to save $ 11.99 a month, but I have to say: MacroFactor is surprisingly good at its job, and it does two things that others don’t. dietary supplements.
The first is technological: MacroFactor does a calorie burn calculation that every meal tracking app should have, but for some reason it usually doesn’t. (Probably because they are so preoccupied with counting your calories during exercise that, as we noted earlier, they usually do not give accurate results .)
The second is psychological: MacroFactor presents its numbers in a factual and judgment-neutral way. You have eaten so many calories. You burned so many calories. No talk of being “off track,” no continuous notification of whether you are achieving your goals. The information is just there. You can use it however you like.
Calculating your calorie needs based on your intake and weight doesn’t have to be revolutionary, but it is
On average, your body burns a certain amount of calories per day. It is commonly referred to as TDEE, which stands for total daily energy expenditure. You will lose weight if you consistently eat less than this number, and gain weight if you consistently eat more. There are tons of details and caveats if you really want to dig into this, but this is the basic idea behind calorie counting.
(To get started, check out our post on weight loss without any bullshit . Gaining weight works the same way, except you’ll be adding calories, not subtracting them.)
Ultimately, you can determine your TDEE by looking at how your weight changes over time. If you are consuming 3000 calories per day and your weight remains stable, then your TDEE should be 3000. If you consume 2500 calories per day and lose a pound per week, this also means that your TDEE is 3000, because that is the number that you must burn.
For reasons I cannot understand, the world is full of apps that track your food calories and apps that track your weight, but almost zero, that do this basic calculation linking the two. Until recently, the most reliable way to determine your TDEE based on your weight was using something like this famous Reddit spreadsheet or making manual adjustments. In other words, if you want to lose weight but the scale doesn’t move, subtract a few hundred more calories and see how it goes.
There is an app called TDEE Tracker that does the same thing as a spreadsheet, but reads data from your food tracking app and your weight tracking app, which automates the process to some extent. Click on a specific week and you will see your average weight for that week and your calculated average TDEE for that week.
There are diet coaching apps like Carbon and RP (both paid) that change their recommendations based on your weight, but they have their own quirks that I never liked. Carbon forces you to rate yourself by how obedient you are to the specific macros he prescribes, and RP never calculates anything with calories at all. Both of these apps expect you to eat exactly what they tell you to eat if you want to exercise properly. And like a rebel, I say to hell.
I hate when the app judges me
For me, an application or a gadget is a tool that I use for my own purposes. I don’t like being hit for breaking streak (maybe I needed a day off, okay, Apple Watch?), And I definitely don’t want to see “oh no, you went over calories in a day” when I’m just trying to get through my damn life , MyFitnessPal!
For the past few years, I have been monitoring my weight because I compete in weight class sports and I have been monitoring my diet – sometimes, not always – to make sure my weight and body composition (muscle versus fat) are up to par. go in any direction that makes sense for my purposes at the moment. But I’m also just a person who eats food, because that’s what we humans do. I don’t need nudges and frowning faces when I’m just trying to document the fact that I’m eating a burrito with 36 grams of protein.
A free answer to this problem is to use Cronometer instead of MyFitnessPal . In Cronometer, you can turn off your macro goals so you never “exceed” your fat or carbohydrate limit. (Previously, you had the option to turn off your calorie target completely, although now it doesn’t seem to be the case.) I can just write down my food and the numbers are what they are.
The low-tech equivalent, by the way, is to simply look at the calories of the foods you eat (on the label, if any, or by searching on Google for, say, “chicken breast meal”). When I got bored with all the apps, I went through a stage where I just took notes on my phone with the protein and calories of each meal, and at the end of the day I added up the total. Works just as well.
But these days? I am using MacroFactor of course. The app shows you every day of the week as a column of rectangles. If you go to your calorie goal or for a given macro, you’ll just see that your rectangle for that day is slightly above its shadow. If you go underground, your rectangle will be shorter than its shadow. That’s all. At the end of the week, a check is done that says the goal is increased by 52 calories or something else. There is no siren “God, you crossed,” and there is no third degree about how closely you followed instructions.
Weight has ups and downs
One of the frustrating things about trying to change your weight is that it doesn’t always change right away. Daily fluctuations are expected: I know I tend to get heavier in the morning after a salty, meaty meal in a restaurant, and I always weigh myself after a night of drinking, thanks to the slightly dehydrating properties of alcohol.
There is a tiny part of my brain that gets scared if the scale goes up half a pound and doesn’t go down right away, even though I’ve seen these ups and downs a million times. My previous solution was to use Happy Scale , an app that focuses on the trendline rather than your last weight. If you are heavier this week on average than last week, then you are probably gaining.
MacroFactor? Yes, that is exactly what it does when calculating your TDEE. The ups and downs of your day do not mean you have dramatic fluctuations in your TDEE or in the actual amount of fat, muscle, organs, and bones you have. At times, the trendline may appear to be slow to respond to real changes; this is your compromise. Overall, I’m happy with how he handles the trend.
Put it all together
This is how it looks from day to day. I track my food in MacroFactor and every morning (after using the toilet, before eating) I weigh myself on a smart scale that automatically updates the data on my phone. When I check the app, I see how many calories I ate in a day, and in smaller text it tells me my calorie goal. There is a “check” every week where the app adjusts my calorie goal for the coming week (usually a very small adjustment, for example, you will have 43 fewer calories this week).
Unlike other diet coaching apps, you can ignore the recommendation and eat what you want and the calculations will continue to work based on what you actually ate, not just what you should have.
This summer I deliberately put on weight to gain muscle mass (I used the RP app for a while and tracked my homemade calories the rest of the time). Fortunately, MacroFactor started up just when it was time to shed some of my weight gain. I just reached my goal this morning and will probably do maintenance next.
It was fascinating to watch my estimated calorie expenditure change over the past two months or so. I see my TDEE increasing around the time I ran ten miles (it was a one day event, but the app marked it this week with a gradual increase, not a sudden jump). Then a week or two after that, when I didn’t run at all (the race day was over and I enjoyed the recovery), and then splash again when I started doing small cardio on the bike every morning. The overall trend was downward, which makes sense when dieting: our bodies can regulate calorie expenditure to conserve energy in ways that we don’t always notice. I wouldn’t be surprised if my TDEE bounces a bit when I return to maintenance mode.
Free alternatives
So what can you do if you are interested in this approach but need a different option beyond this particular application? If you’ve read it carefully, you already know the answer. To recreate this functionality, you need three applications:
- Chronometer to track your food (change settings as needed for your mental health)
- Happy Scale (iOS) or Libra (Android) to flatten the weight loss / gain / weight maintenance trend line
- TDEE Tracker (iOS), Adaptive TDEE Calculator (Android) or TDEE Spreadsheet to estimate calories burned based on daily weight changes.
Track your food in the chronometer and either enter your weight into the weight tracker app every day, or let smart weights enter it automatically . Check the TDEE app weekly and adjust the chronometer calorie target to match (for example, 500 calories below the TDEE estimate would be a typical goal for losing one pound per week).