Energy balance is the relationship between the calories you eat and the calories you burn. It's the reason your weight changes, and it's the fundamental concept behind how MacrosFirst sets your targets. This article explains how it works, how to read your Energy Balance screen, why most diets stall or burn out over time, and how MacrosFirst keeps you moving.
When you eat less than you burn, you're in a deficit, and over time your weight trends down. When you eat more than you burn, you're in a surplus, and your weight trends up. When the two are about equal, your weight holds steady. Notice the words "over time": day to day, the scale bounces around with water and food, so energy balance shows up in your trend weight over a week or two, not overnight. See Scale Weight vs. Trend Weight.
MacrosFirst builds your targets on this idea, but it doesn't stop at a single calculation. It measures your actual expenditure from your own food logs and weigh-ins, accounting for your body composition, since a pound of fat and a pound of lean tissue hold very different amounts of energy. It sets your goal rate as a percentage of your body weight per week, so your target deficit or surplus scales with your body instead of being a fixed number. And with Plus, it repeats all of this every week, so your targets keep adapting as your body changes. The rest of this article shows why that matters. See How MacrosFirst Sets Your Targets.
To see your own energy balance, go to your Dashboard and tap the Energy Balance card. It shows the last 30 days by default.
Surplus or Deficit: at the top, your average daily surplus or deficit for the range you're viewing.
The chart: your daily intake compared with your expenditure. Tap and hold a day to see its intake, expenditure, and surplus or deficit.
Avg Expenditure and Avg Calories: your average daily energy burn and average daily intake for the range.
Energy Balance Trends: your average surplus or deficit over the last 3, 7, 14, 30, and 90 days.
A list of each day’s intake relative to your expenditure.
If you've ever followed a diet that worked great for a month or two and then quietly stopped working, or got so hard you gave up, you're not imagining it, and it probably wasn't your fault. Most diets fail in one of two ways.
A fixed calorie target stalls. Say you start a diet at 1,800 calories a day while burning about 2,300. That's a 500-calorie deficit, or roughly a pound a week. But as you lose weight, you burn less. A smaller body takes less energy to maintain and to move around, and your body also adapts to eating less, often by nudging you to move a little less without noticing. After losing 20 lb, you might be burning closer to 2,050. Your diet is still 1,800, so your deficit has shrunk to 250, and your progress has slowed to half the speed. Keep going, and eventually the gap closes entirely and you plateau. Nothing went wrong with you. The target simply stopped matching your body. Research on long-term weight change shows that simple calorie math, the old “a 3,500 calorie deficit always yields weight loss of 1 pound per week”, which ignores these effects, badly overestimates how much weight people actually lose.
A fixed weekly loss burns you out. The other common approach, aiming for a steady pound every week, fails in the opposite direction. As your expenditure drops, holding a pound a week means cutting deeper and deeper. At 200 lb and burning about 2,600 calories a day, a pound a week is a 500-calorie deficit, about a fifth of what you burn. At 150 lb and burning closer to 2,100, that same pound a week takes nearly a quarter of everything you burn. The diet keeps getting harder right when you're most tired of it, which is how diet fatigue and burnout set in.
MacrosFirst avoids both problems by setting your rate as a percentage of your body weight and, with Plus, re-measuring your expenditure every week.
Say your goal is to lose 0.5% of your body weight per week. At 200 lb, that's about 1 lb a week, so your target sits about 500 calories below the roughly 2,600 you burn. As you lose weight, two things happen at each weekly check-in. MacrosFirst re-measures your expenditure, so it sees that you're burning less. And it applies your 0.5% to your current weight, so your weekly goal eases along with you. By 160 lb, you're aiming to lose about 0.8 lb a week, about 400 calories below the roughly 2,250 you now burn.
Your deficit stays about the same share of what you burn the whole way down, so the plan asks about the same effort from you at 160 lb as it did at 200 lb. A plan chasing a steady pound a week would have you at about 1,750 by then, a deficit closer to a quarter of what you burn.
That does mean the number of pounds you lose each week gradually gets smaller as you get lighter. That's expected and deliberate, not a plateau: you're still losing the same share of your body weight every week. It's what keeps you moving without the stalls, diet fatigue, and burnout that come from chasing a fixed number.
It works the same way when you're gaining. Your rate is a percentage of your body weight, so your surplus scales with you, and as you get bigger, your measured expenditure rises too. And if you're maintaining, your target follows your expenditure so you keep holding your weight. See Your Weekly Check-In.
On the free plan, your targets don't update weekly. Instead, MacrosFirst offers to recalculate them every 10 lb (5 kg) of weight change by recalculating a new initial expenditure based on population averages and not your individual expenditure and energy balance. Following a generalized plan instead of a personal plan informed by your real data may yield slower, less consistent results. See Plan Updates on the Free Plan.
Because your target follows what you actually burn, it will come down as you lose weight, since a smaller body simply needs less. Your percentage-based rate keeps that change gradual and proportional, but there's still a floor: MacrosFirst won't set your target below 1,200 calories (women) or 1,500 calories (men), or 85% of your estimated resting energy, whichever is higher. If you reach it, your progress will be slower than your chosen rate.
And no plan takes the effort out of dieting entirely. If your target starts to feel hard to stick to, that's a signal worth listening to. Switching to a slower rate of weight loss, or spending some time at maintenance before your next phase, is often the better move. See Setting Your Weight Goal.
Energy balance ties together everything MacrosFirst measures. These articles go further on each piece:
"Why does the scale jump around so much?" Scale Weight vs. Trend Weight
"How does MacrosFirst measure what I burn?" Energy Expenditure
"How does my target get updated each week?" Your Weekly Check-In
How do I choose the right rate for my goal? Now that you know how the gap between eating and burning drives your progress, the next step is choosing a goal and a rate you can stick with: Setting Your Weight Goal: Lose, Maintain, or Gain.
