Overview & Best Practices
Macro Chief is an incredibly powerful nutrition tool with many layers of functionality. This article aims to provide you with a broad understanding of the app, guiding you to maximize its effectiveness.
Overview and Best Practices
- Log All Meals: Try to prioritize your calorie and protein targets, but don’t worry about being perfect, especially in the first week.
- Regular Weigh-Ins: Weighing in multiple times per week gives the best estimation of where your weight truly sits and Macro Chief uses weight averages from each week to make decisions.
- Manage Partial Logs: Delete incomplete entries or fill in missing meals to the algorithm can provide you with the best recommendations.
- Embrace the Process: Stay consistent with the app through the good and bad. Your plan becomes more precise over time, tailoring your diet for optimal progress.
Initial Setup
When you create an account with Macro Chief, you’ll provide basic info such as height, weight, age, activity levels, goals, and more. The algorithm takes all of these factors into account to build your plan, which is a complete overview of calorie and macronutrient targets for each day of the week. If you are new to macro tracking, focus on total calories and protein. Energy balance (calorie intake vs. expenditure) is king and protein provides the raw material to repair and build muscle tissue. Whether or not you adhere to the fat and carb targets is far less relevant and will be tweaked later on anyways.
Starting Numbers
The initial calculations in Macro Chief are as accurate as possible, but they’re just the starting point. The true power of the app lies in its ability to adapt and refine your plan based on consistent tracking. This dynamic process helps in understanding your body’s metabolic rate and total daily energy expenditure (TDEE).
Weekly Adjustments
As you log your food daily, Macro Chief analyzes your calorie and macronutrient intake, correlating it with your weight data and goal rate of progression. Every week, during your check-in, the app assesses your progress and makes necessary adjustments to your targets. This process ensures your plan evolves with your eating habits and body’s responses.
Balancing Macros
While protein targets remain relatively stable, fats and carbs are adjusted according to your actual consumption patterns. The app essentially shapes your plan around your dietary preferences, so there is no need to stress over perfectly nailing the fat and carb numbers.
Key Features & Insights
Net Carb Tracking
Macro Chief focuses on net carbs (total carbs minus fiber), giving you a clear picture of usable carbs/calories. Foods that you search in the database will display their net carbs automatically so you don’t have to try to do the mental math in your head. So if you see slightly different carb or calorie numbers on foods in app vs their packaging, that is why. Macro Chief is providing you the “real” numbers so that you know exactly what’s coming into your body.
Guilt-Free Coaching
Your plan’s accuracy will improve whether or not you hit your numbers each week. The calculations done during the check-in can assess how well the current numbers are working regardless of your accuracy in hitting them, so as l long as you are logging everything you eat and weighing in regularly (2-3+ times per week) your plan will get more and more precise.
Common Challenges & Solutions
A lot of time has gone into making sure the algorithm can take anything you throw at it. However, it does have one weakness that can be exploited – incomplete food logs.
Incomplete Food Logs
Incomplete logs, like logging breakfast but missing the rest of the day’s meals, will throw off your plan. Unfortunately Macro Chief has no way of knowing that this data is incomplete. If this goes unchanged your estimated calorie needs will be significantly lower than they ought to be and your plan will be thrown completely out of whack.
But we do have protections in place for this. When doing your weekly check-in there is a step to verify the completeness of your food logs from the week. Questionable days will be highlighted in red, drawing your attention to them. This check is done on any food log that has at least one meal logged where the total calories for the day are less than 70% of the target mark (e.g. 1300 calories logged on a 2000 calorie target day would be flagged – 65%).
Days without meals logged are not counted toward your averages for the week. So if you realize one of your logs is incomplete, you can either fill in the missing meals or delete everything from that day.
Fasted Days
If you’re fasting, you can mark the day as ‘fasted’ from the food log ellipsis menu (…). This lets the system account for the skipped calories accurately.
Skipping Check-Ins
Finally, if you ever have a really bad week, whether you failed to log much of anything, you were sick, didn’t work out as usual, or for any other reason, you can always skip your check-in update. This will simply take your current targets and repeat them for the next week.
To be clear, there is no need to be perfect all week. Whether you hit the targets or not your plan will get better the more info you provide. For the most part, there isn’t ever a negative to checking in and updating your plan, but you do have the option to skip it during an unusual week.
And that wraps up the best practices overview for Macro Chief. Set your goal, log your meals doing your best to nail your calorie and protein targets, weigh in regularly, and let the algorithm work its magic.
