Your daily calorie and macro targets in MacrosFirst aren't a number we pulled from a generic calculator and left alone. Most calculators estimate how much you burn from your age, height, weight, and activity level, hand you a target, and stop there. But two people with the same stats can burn hundreds of calories apart, and your own needs change as your weight, training, and routine change.
MacrosFirst works differently. It learns your personalized energy expenditure from your calorie intake and body weight changes, applies your weight goal to set your targets, and with Plus, repeats that every week based on your own data to keep you making progress. You can think of it as a simple loop: measure what you burn, plan your targets around your goal, and adjust as you go.
This article walks through that loop. Each step links to a detailed article if you want to go deeper.
Everything starts with your energy expenditure: the total number of calories your body burns in a day, from simply being alive to digesting food, moving around, and exercising. If MacrosFirst knows how much you burn, it knows how much you should eat to reach your goal.
When you first set up a plan, MacrosFirst gives you a starting estimate of your daily energy expenditure. It's built from published research on how much energy people actually burn in everyday life, adjusted for your body and activity level. That's a good place to start, but it describes an average person who looks like you on paper but isn’t exactly you.
So MacrosFirst goes beyond population averages: as you log your food and weigh in, MacrosFirst compares what you eat with how your weight trend responds, and works out what you really burn. If you've been eating around 2,200 calories a day and your weight has held steady, your body is burning about 2,200 a day. If your weight is trending down on that same intake, you're burning more, and how fast it's dropping tells MacrosFirst how much more.
Learn more in Energy Expenditure: How MacrosFirst Measures What You Burn.
Once MacrosFirst knows roughly what you burn, your weight goal decides where to set your target. To lose weight, you eat below your expenditure. To gain, you eat above it, usually by a smaller amount. To maintain, you eat right at it.
How far above or below depends on the rate you choose. In MacrosFirst, your rate is a percentage of your body weight per week rather than a fixed number of pounds, so your deficit or surplus scales with your body as it changes. The faster your rate, the bigger the deficit and the lower your target. If your target ever feels surprisingly low, your rate is almost always the reason.
Maintaining works a little differently in MacrosFirst than in most apps. Elsewhere, "maintain" usually means one fixed number. Here, your maintenance target keeps following your expenditure, so if you start training harder or your days get more active, your target moves with you and you keep holding the weight you want instead of slowly drifting away from it.
Learn more in Setting Your Weight Goal: Lose, Maintain, or Gain.
Your nutrition plan takes "eat about this much" and turns it into the actual calorie, protein, carb, and fat targets you see in your Journal each day. You choose how much of that you want MacrosFirst to handle. MacrosFirst offers three different nutrition plan types:
Autopilot: MacrosFirst sets your calories and macros for you every week, based on a few preferences like your diet style, protein level, and whether you want higher-calorie days.
Copilot: MacrosFirst sets your weekly calories, and you decide your own allocation of those calories across days and macros.
Manual: you enter your own targets for each day, and they don't update automatically.
Autopilot and Copilot are part of Plus; Manual is free.
Learn more in Nutrition Plans: Autopilot, Copilot, and Manual.
Your body doesn't stand still. As you lose weight, you burn a little less. As your training or daily routine changes, your expenditure moves too. A target that was right in your first month can quietly stop working by your third.
That's why, with Autopilot and Copilot, MacrosFirst asks you to complete a quick check-in once a week. It reviews your past week of logging, updates your expenditure from your latest data, and adjusts your targets to match, so you stay on track toward your goal at the rate you chose.
On the free plan, your targets don't update weekly. Instead, every 10 lb (5 kg) of weight change toward your goal, MacrosFirst offers to recalculate them using population averages at your new weight. See Plan Updates on the Free Plan.
Learn more in Your Weekly Check-In.
Say you weigh 180 lb and want to lose 0.5% of your body weight per week, which works out to about 0.9 lb a week to start. Based on your profile, MacrosFirst estimates you burn around 2,500 calories a day, so your Autopilot plan starts you at about 2,050, roughly 450 calories below.
You log consistently for a few weeks, and your weight trend drops about 1.2 lb per week, faster than planned. That tells MacrosFirst you actually burn more than its starting estimate, closer to 2,650. Over your next few check-ins, your expenditure catches up, and your target rises toward 2,200 so you keep losing about 0.5% a week instead of faster.
Months later, at 165 lb, your 0.5% works out to a little over 0.8 lb a week, and you're burning a little less. Your check-ins pick up both, so your target eases down gradually and your deficit stays about the same share of what you burn. Your progress doesn't stall, and the plan doesn't get harder as you go.
MacrosFirst handles the math, but you're always in charge of the inputs: your weight goal and rate, your plan type and its settings, and your expenditure settings, like your activity level, body fat, and the date your expenditure calculation starts (useful if you ever want to start over). You also keep your data honest by marking days you didn't fully log as incomplete. Perfect logging isn't required, but consistent logging is.
See What Data MacrosFirst Needs to Update Your Targets.
Plan tab: your current goal, current plan, goal history, and your weekly check-in
Dashboard > Expenditure and Dashboard > Energy Balance: your expenditure and energy balance charts (Plus)
More > Energy Expenditure: your starting estimate, start date, activity levels, and body fat
Journal > ... > Edit Day Details: mark a day as fasting or incomplete
This article covers the big picture. Each part of the loop has its own article with the details, from the research behind your starting estimate to exactly what happens when you check in. If you have a specific question, jump straight to the answer:
"What am I looking at on the expenditure chart?" Reading Your Expenditure Chart
"Why am I gaining or losing slower than expected?" Energy Balance
"Why is my calorie target so low?" Setting Your Weight Goal and Troubleshooting
"Which plan type should I choose?" Nutrition Plans
"What does each plan setting do?" Autopilot, Copilot, Manual
"How does the check-in work?" Your Weekly Check-In
"How much do I need to log?" What Data MacrosFirst Needs
"How do I change my activity level or start date?" Expenditure Settings
"What happens if I cancel Plus?" Downgrading from Plus to Free
How does MacrosFirst know what I burn? Expenditure is the foundation everything else is built on. Once you understand how MacrosFirst measures it, the rest of the system makes sense, so that's the best place to go next: Energy Expenditure: How MacrosFirst Measures What You Burn.
