Reflecting on the MacroFactor, food tracker

In 2022 I became frustrated and concerned with my health and wellness. As part of this journey I started considering a nutrition coach. Becca and I had done some work in this area in 2020. When I decided to remove sausage from my diet, she helped me find a replacement (a mix of cashews and pumpkin seeds). In 2022, she recommended I find something else because she was finding it difficult to help in this area based on some of my constraints. I decided to start with MacroFactor, and see where it could take me.

I’ve been using the app since late August 2023.

When I first got the app I entered my estimated caloric expenditure based on the WHOOP data of about 2,500 calories on average. I also purchased a scale as regular weigh-ins help the app run its calculations.

When I look for health-related things, I try to stick with things that prioritize me being an individual as opposed to being part of a generic cohort. When it comes to the variables of the human body, we are simply too unique for purely generic information. MacroFactor seems to fit this bill.

I’ve tried a few different food trackers over the years, but none of them stuck, and do I always went back to a spreadsheet.

Something that always bothered me was how difficult it was to do the main activity for the app; logging food. MacroFactor claimed to solve specifically solve for this problem, and I think they’ve succeeded. Even when using the barcode scanning feature I found it took forever, was often the wrong product, or the product couldn’t be found. I still get the error that a product couldn’t be found using MacroFactor, but I don’t feel like I’m waiting forever to find out, and sometimes when I scan the same item a second time, it finds it (quickly).

Another thing that always bothered me was the heavy (or sole) reliance on crowdsourcing data for the food database. This tended to lead to a lot of duplication, and worse, wildly different data for the same, duplicated entries. MacroFactor does have a crowdsourcing aspect, however, it appears to be done in a way that reduces duplication. With that said, having the same or similar meals by different restaurants or suppliers is a bit bothersome. Further, having the same food type be available in completely different measurement options is also bothersome.

Let me give you an example.

If I search for “french fries,” there are over a dozen varieties. If I choose the generic french fries, I can select to measure it in grams or ounces, large, medium, small, or by the pound. If I choose the “French fries from a restaurant other than fast food” option I can measure it using 17 different options, I won’t list here. If I choose “Applebee’s french fries” I can measure them in grams or ounces, serving count, or by the pound.

Same food, generally speaking, three unique sets of options to measure. Further, if I put in 100 grams for each, they give roughly the same numbers. Not the best or the worst, but bothersome.

MacroFactor also goes beyond food logging by adding the coaching aspect, which I appreciate. Even though I feel like I’m going to explode as it calibrates.

The first time I weighed in I was at around 234 pounds. During this time I was just getting to a point where I could complete my full physical therapy prescription, I was walking at least 4 miles per day, and I was able to do the MovNat Fundamentals Week 1, Day 1 session in its entirety. That’s on top of the morning system integrity check I do.

The next day I weighed myself and was 230. A week later, I was 235. Then I started bouncing between 230 and 220 from one day to the next.

I literally thought the scale was broken. I grabbed a 5 pound bag of cashews I had just purchased to check. It came up 5 pounds. Still not trusting it, I grabbed a 5 pound of pumpkin seeds and a one pound bag of collagen powder. Both read as the correct weight.

Anyway, this had the app (and me) a bit confused. For the first week the app used my average 2,500 caloric expenditure from WHOOP for the first week before jumping up rapidly before topping out at 4,250 calories per day.

Putting that in context, my basal metabolic rate for a sedentary lifestyle, based on generic population, not me specifically is 2,100 calories. So, MacroFactor estimated I was burning double my estimated basal metabolic rate, which is not easy to do through activity alone. However, it also means I should have been withering away given I’ve had the same meal plan for 3 years coming in around 2,500 calories.

All that build up to say, the next week the coach jumped my plan up to 3,000 calories per day. And every week it continued to increase about 125 calories per week. The cost of food more than doubled, and I started depending more on supplements and processed nutritionally dense foods (think protein bars) to reduce volume while still hitting the targets.

I’m starting to use the app to adjust for the future, but still.

I edited my goals and reset the program, which dropped things a bit. Further, when I get a new physical therapy prescription there’s always an adjustment period with less activity as I find my comfort zone and build back up, so, my weight has been holding steady at 230, and my trend weight has be steadily increasing. This also means the expenditure calculated by the app has been steadily decreasing with a greater flux range.

I’m also still getting accustomed to the app and realized to things. First, if you choose to let the calories flux day-to-day, you’re selecting days you’d like a higher caloric intake available, I chose everyday but one, my fasting day. Second, I might shift to the collaborative coaching mode to better account for my fasting day.

It’s been a rough couple of weeks.

But new things often come with hiccups. There are far more things I appreciate about the app.

Like being able to modify the shortcut bar. Recipes are great. The ability to explode the recipe into its parts to remove things (you can modify it, but I like the exploding). The micronutrient information is also awesome as well; had never heard of choline until that. The benefit of recipes is the ability add a bunch of stuff with one discrete action, the drawback is the nutrition information uses the full recipe to calculate contribution, but exploding the recipes will show contributions of each ingredient.

I did pay for a year in advance because it’s not that much compared to, say, the WHOOP.