Your weight goal tells MacrosFirst which direction you want the scale to move and how fast. Together with your expenditure, it decides your calorie target. This article covers how to set a goal, how to choose a rate you can stick with, and why your rate is a percentage of your body weight rather than a fixed number of pounds. For the big picture, see How MacrosFirst Sets Your Targets.
Tap the Plan tab.
Tap New Goal to start a new goal, or Edit Goal to change your current one.
Choose Lose Weight, Gain Weight, or Maintain Weight.
Enter your target weight (or, for maintain, the weight you want to maintain).
Choose how fast you want to get there.
Confirm your body fat level. It doesn't have to be perfect.
Choose your nutrition plan type and set it up. See Nutrition Plans: Autopilot, Copilot, and Manual.
In MacrosFirst, your rate is the percentage of your body weight that you wish to gain or lose per week. When you set it, you'll see it both as a percentage and as pounds (or kilograms) per week, so you know what to expect right now. MacrosFirst also shows the date you'd reach your goal weight at that rate.
The app marks a Recommended range: about 0.25% to 0.9% of your body weight per week when losing, and about 0.1% to 0.35% when gaining. For most people, that's the sweet spot for making steady progress and being able to stick with it.
However, you can choose a rate outside the recommended range. If you're losing, a faster rate means a larger deficit, which can be hard to stick to and hard to sustain for long. If you're gaining, a faster rate tends to add more fat along with muscle than most people would prefer.
A pound a week means something very different at 250 lb than it does at 150 lb. As you lose weight, your body burns less, so holding a fixed pound a week means maintaining an ever increasing deficit as you lose weight, and that is difficult.
That's why MacrosFirst always works from a percentage. At each weekly check-in, it applies your rate to your current weight. As you get lighter, your weekly goal in pounds eases a little, and your deficit stays about the same share of what you burn. The plan asks about the same effort from you in the last week as it did in the first.
So if you notice you're losing fewer pounds per week than when you started, that's expected and deliberate, not a plateau. You're still losing the same share of your body weight every week, and it's what keeps you moving without the stalls, diet fatigue, and burnout that come from chasing a fixed number. Gaining works the same way in reverse: your surplus grows with you. For the full explanation, see Energy Balance: Why Progress Can Slow and How MacrosFirst Adapts.
And of course, you can always update your goal, including its target rate at any time.
Your rate decides how far below (or above) your expenditure your calorie target sits. For someone who weighs 180 lb, losing 0.5% per week means aiming for about 0.9 lb this week, which puts their target roughly 450 calories a day below their expenditure. At 1% per week, that's about 1.8 lb and roughly 900 calories a day below. As their weight changes, both numbers scale with them.
Gaining works the same way in the other direction. Recommended gain rates are much slower than loss rates, so the surplus is smaller.
Almost always, it's because of an aggressive rate. Doubling your rate doubles your deficit. If your target feels too low to stick to, try a slower rate. You'll still get there, and a target you can follow beats a faster one you can't.
MacrosFirst also has a minimum: it won't set your calorie target below 1,200 calories (women) or 1,500 calories (men), or 85% of your estimated resting energy, whichever is higher. If your chosen rate would put you below that minimum, your target stops at the minimum, and you'll progress a bit slower than the rate you picked.
In most apps, a maintain goal gives you one fixed calorie number based on your weight when you set it. MacrosFirst works differently.
With Plus, a maintain goal still follows your expenditure every week. If you start training more, take a more active job, or your body simply changes, your expenditure changes, and your targets move with it to keep you at your target maintenance weight. That means your plan helps you actually hold your weight, instead of a static target that slowly drifts out of date.
Your nutrition plan is built around your goal, so when you start a new goal or edit your current one, you'll also create a new nutrition plan to go with it. Any change to your target weight, rate, or body fat level means your target calories and macros need to be worked out again.
Use New Goal when you're starting a new phase, like switching from losing weight to maintaining. Your previous goal moves to Goal History on the Plan tab. Use Edit Goal when you want to adjust your current goal, like picking a slower rate or a new target weight. Editing updates your current goal in place, so it doesn't add a new entry to Goal History. Its entry there simply shows what you changed.
You can delete a goal from your history by swiping it to the left on the Plan screen.
Your goal and rate shape everything else in your plan. These articles go further:
"Why does my weekly loss get smaller over time?" Energy Balance
"Which nutrition plan should I choose?" Nutrition Plans
"Why does my calorie target look off?" Troubleshooting
Which nutrition plan is right for me? Once you've set your goal, the next step is choosing how much of the planning you want MacrosFirst to handle: Nutrition Plans: Autopilot, Copilot, and Manual.
