Episode 11: Macrofactor Review

despite lifting weights for a long time and essentially following bodybuilder workout
routines for aesthetic purposes i've never been a calorie tracker i've always just eaten
uh i what they tend to refer to as intuitively um although from from my perspective it's just
eating like a normal person uh for those of you who don't you know know too much about this
bodybuilders in particular 10 are notorious for tracking their calories and their macronutrients
throughout the course of a day so you know they've had whatever 3 000 calories for the day
300 grams or uh 300 grams of it was carbs 100 grams was fat 200 grams of protein you know however
the math works out and there are certain goals nested in there you want to make sure in particular
you have enough protein throughout the day that you're not overdoing it on fats that kind of
stuff but i've never done any of that uh i've never been one to track my calories or macronutrients i
didn't come up that way i just i i was an athlete throughout my younger life but not for bodybuilding
um so i just never learned or made that part of my life i decided to give that a whirl uh with the help of an app so over the
course of the last i guess couple months now i have been tracking my calories and again it's not like i wasn't
familiar with how to do this weighing food i'm not going to go through all that the real purpose of this is to talk about the app that i
started using called macro factor just to be clear this isn't like a some kind of sponsored thing or
whatever um it's just so happens to be what i what i end up using there's some people behind this uh
the way that i bumped into it was through a guy named jeff nippard i'll link to his youtube channel
because that's typically where i've you know seen his work there are many apps that one could choose
uh on the app store to track calories one of the most um used ones i believe is called my fitness pal
i have downloaded and opened that in the past and messed around a little bit wasn't really my thing
there are some things that make macro factor unique or at least unique across the things that i have done
before most notably it's backed by a bunch of research that will adjust your nutrition based on what
your plan is and and and it's not so so it's always important with this sort of thing to kind of define
your goals right goals for me i do go i i have been for several years now following bulk and cut
cycles of eating throughout the year typically or at least i mean we'll take last year last year i think
i bulked for about eight months cut for the remaining four that was sort of the dynamic
so if you're just straight trying to lose weight that's a different type of goal if you are just
straight trying to gain weight or just stay where you are those are all things that this can handle
but for my purposes i i started using this app right toward the tail end of a maintenance phase
moving into a bulk what i have like one of the things i've liked about this is that it's more gradual
uh it seems to be much more intentional about things it'd be very easy typically if you look go and
talk to someone and they say oh how do you how do you bulk well just add 500 calories to your diet
well you don't necessarily want to make that switch overnight and this app accommodates for that
it kind of gradually builds you up each week you kind of do a check-in it'll adjust your calories
sometimes just a little sometimes it'll swing it by a little bit more but i i like that piece of
things where it's giving you kind of this for this this range and you can see it working week after
week based on your real data so based on your you weigh in every morning you should really be doing
that anyway if you're doing this sort of thing but between your weigh-in data and your
eating data that you log throughout the course of the day it will adjust your plan accordingly
so what you know there's some things i like about this app and there's some things i think
need some improvement it is a relatively new app i believe um so you know you can take my feedback
with a grain of salt but some of the stuff i do like again the plans the way that it sets up the plans
and you can tell it's using data effectively in a in the most effective way that it knows how
to try to adjust how you should eat throughout the course of your week um it also is pretty
accommodating if you miss some days along the way i try not to but there are days that you know for
one reason or another it just doesn't make any sense that day to log my food that's rare or it has
been rare since i've started using it but it still you know it happens and the app will accommodate
for that it doesn't just bottom out for the week and not know what to do with that so that's been
that's been useful um it has a food scanner in it so if you're eating food that has come primarily in
packages with barcodes you can scan it it'll just kind of load the stuff over it has a you know a way to
search things up it does a pretty good job at remembering your history from day to day so if
you'll often eat the same things which i tend to it's pretty easy to pull that up from the day before
it feels now it's it's a it it is a there's a barrier to entry of paying so it's not a free app
in that you i think you can try it for like seven days or something like that but ultimately you do need
to pay to use this and i think that payment is worth it it does feel like a premium app a premium
product above and beyond what you can get with a lot of the free apps like my fitness pal for instance
and i thought that the price was very reasonable um i don't remember what it was off top of my head
i think it was like i don't know 50 or 60 bucks for six months or something it wasn't it wasn't too bad
and it you do feel or i feel like i'm getting a much more rich experience and it's much more of a
nutrition home base for me than just any old food logging app the other big thing to like about
this app is the data it really does go out of its way to put a lot of different data visualizations in
front of you so you really have a pretty good picture you know how much how much you've eaten
that day what's remaining what are your macros how is it tracking over time how does it compare to your
energy expenditure which i'm not 100 sure how it calculates but whatever puts a lot of data in front
of you and just based on my experience having been you know doing this more intuitively for years
it it did reaffirm to me that generally speaking i knew what i was doing like i didn't see anything
so outlandishly crazy that i was like whoa what is that there are some things i think need some
improvement and maybe some of this will come with time um i said there's you know food tracking and
scanning and stuff i think the food database leaves a lot to be desired a lot of the scanning works
pretty good but i'm surprised when i go to look for something very generic like just a basic food
that there aren't many um they kind of the app kind of splits up the food choices between common foods
branded foods like so you know if you're eating a particular brand of food that's one category versus
if it's just the it's like having an apple versus an apple from a particular company
i am surprised how
lacking the common foods are
it it seems like i should be able to search up some basic stuff like i should be able to search for
like meatball or something and not have to choose a particular brand because i think that there is a
and i know that not all meatballs the same whatever but if you don't know the specific type
of meatball that you are eating you have to pick sort of a branded one and and they might be different
from one another and that's not really accurate it seems to me you could create kind of like what is
an average meatball and make that a common food as an aside i don't know offhand if meatball is listed
as a common food i'm just using as an example there are other things i've run into where i just type in a
basic type of food and there is no option to choose other than ones that have
uh that have a brand associated with them which i don't think is great
i think some of the user experience stuff in the app is clunky
um again it's a premium product and it's a very data-driven product so there's a lot of options and
buttons and check boxes and the interface can get a little complicated i'm okay with complicated
but there's certain things where you'll be entering food and you think hitting a button
like log food is going to take you back to a certain interface or a certain screen but instead
it just pops the food in and then takes you to the the day view there's just some weird things with
the flow of buttons and controls that sometimes it does stuff that i don't expect and then i'm like
wait a minute what happened not the biggest deal in the world again it's kind of a dense
interface and i think they do a pretty good job at balancing that but there are some things that
they could probably work on there particularly around button naming and button options another
thing that could be improved it's very difficult to track alcohol consumption now a couple things
first of all it's on their roadmap now to what capacity it's on the roadmap i don't know
they do say they're going to create this item or this this feature or expand it or whatever
i don't know how they're going to do that exactly but as of right now it's very difficult to track
alcohol with any kind of um veracity even from a branded alcohol perspective it's there's not a lot
of options let alone if you like me tend to go to like things like craft breweries and you've know
they don't have any concept of that at all at the very least i think it would be great to see
some basic alcohol consumption categories typically when i think about consuming alcohol there's a few
categories in my head you know is it a shot that's going to be around 100 calories if it's straight
liquor is it a beer it's going to be like around 200 to 250 calories if it's a craft beer is it a
light beer then it's probably like 100 to 150 calories is it a big fruity drink well then it's
probably 300 plus right and i kind of just that's how i section things off in my brain i'm when i'm
thinking about calories and alcohol it's like you've got shots light beers heavier beers and then you know
big fruity drinks filled with lots of sugar even basic categories like that to have some concept of
tracking what you're doing would be nice um what i end up doing instead is just i end up if i you know
have some drinks for a day i'll just put in a big batch at one time i'll just say like oh there was
like 1500 assorted calories but that kind of misses how much alcohol might be in there or
any of the macros so it's not a kind of a blunt method it gives me the calories but not anything
other other than the calories and again i don't drink tons but on the days that i do drink it would
be nice to have something here that would be a little bit easier uh finally i would say that one of
the weaker parts of the app is the ai entry it's pretty dumb ai uh i feel like there's a lot better
in today's world we've come to expect a lot more out of ai than this offers um it's pretty dumb entry
for instance if i've gone there and i've said oh chicken meatballs with a dark sauce and it's just
very blunt brute force it comes back to the app and sometimes it will list chicken it'll give me
like chicken and if i can find some sort of sauce and it just kind of shoves those in it doesn't do
a good job at breaking a description of a food down of like a complex meal like if you oh you can't
just write oh i had some mashed potatoes and and some chicken and i had some sauce on it and some
green beans give me an average and i know that's not a great description but i feel like i should be
able to do better with that than it does what i find myself doing a lot particularly when i go out
to eat right because if you go out to eat you really don't know what's in that food unless
some places will have some calories and macros listed but if you're like a like a nice restaurant
or something they don't have any of that so what i end up doing taking a picture of the best angle
i can kind of find of the plate of food i'm going to eat i come back later upload that picture into
chat gpt and kind of interrogate chat gpt to give me a ballpark of what might be in it i've found that
i've checked that against some known quantities of food i find it to be reasonably accurate it's at
least in the ballpark and at the end of the day all of this calorie and macro tracking is always
going to be ballpark there's always margin for error if you get to the end of your day and your
app says you've eaten 2700 calories and you think you've eaten exactly 2700 calories you're out of
your mind it's all there's all kinds of margin of error that can happen here so i find that my
workflow of grabbing a picture thrown into a more advanced ai asking for some analysis around it
including i'll ask it about you know approximately how many how much weight do you think this is
in grams what do you think what do you think's inside of it give me an approximate calories and
macros and stuff and it comes back with what it can do and i think it does pretty well it seems like
reasonable numbers generally speaking so a feature that's closer to that where you could snap a picture
of the food and ask it a few questions might be good clearly that sort of technology exists but what
it has in the app is is virtually useless from from my point of view so anyway uh overall i've found this
i've been successful and i've done a number of things with this i've over the last again couple months
i've been able to track my food at home fairly easily i've been able to get some ballpark when i eat
out i've been able to compensate for sort of the lack of alcohol tracking the best that i can at
least in estimates and overall it has given me a pretty clear picture i think or a pretty accurate
picture of where i'm going and helps adjust my plan as i go and i'm going to keep using it it hasn't
been that bad the biggest issue is usually when you make a dinner and you're running around
scanning 50 000 barcodes while your family waits for you to sit down outside of that which is just
an inconvenience but that's just how these things work so uh overall uh if you're looking for something
to track calories macros if you're trying to die if you're trying to do whatever check it out um i
really i think it's uh as far as the ones that i've used throughout the years or at least tried
i think this is a pretty good one and i like its approach to to most things