With a Manual plan, you set your own calorie and macro targets for each day of the week, and they stay exactly as you set them. MacrosFirst never automatically updates them.
Manual plans are free, and they're a great fit if you're following targets from a coach or dietitian, or you simply prefer full control. This article covers how to enter your targets, the shortcuts that make entering them quick (hint: you can copy targets from one day to the others), and how to change a day’s target on your Journal as a one-off. Not sure Manual is right for you? See Nutrition Plans: Autopilot, Copilot, and Manual.
To create a Manual plan, tap the Plan tab, tap New Plan, and choose Manual.
To change your targets later, tap Edit Plan on the Plan tab.
A new Manual plan starts blank. Tap a day on the chart at the top, enter its targets below, then tap Save and Continue when your week is ready.
For each day, you can enter Protein, Carbs, and Fat, in grams or as a percentage of your calories, plus a Calories target. The fields work together.
When you enter a macro in grams, your calorie target follows your macros automatically, at 4 calories per gram of protein and carbs and 9 per gram of fat. When you change a macro's percentage, the other two rebalance so all three still add up to 100%, and the grams update to match. When you type a calorie target yourself, it stays where you put it and your macros don't move. Clear the field, and it goes back to following your macros.
Any field you leave empty simply isn't tracked. That's handy if you only care about setting targets for a few numbers, like protein and calories.
Say your coach gives you 180 g of protein, 200 g of carbs, and 70 g of fat. Enter those in grams, and your calorie target fills in as 2,150 on its own.
The one rule is that your calorie target can't be less than the calories from your macros. If it is when you save, MacrosFirst offers to update your calorie target to match your macros, or you can fix it yourself.
If your weekly schedule includes the same targets on multiple days, you don't need to type them in manually for each day. Tap the ... menu and choose Copy targets to... to copy the selected day onto other days, or Copy targets from... to replace the selected day with another day's targets. A quick way to build a week is to set up Monday, copy it to every other day, and then adjust the days that are different.
Sometimes a single date doesn't match your usual schedule, like if your Wednesday training day got scrapped and so you want to eat like it’s a Saturday rest day. When changes like this come up you don't need to edit your recurring schedule.
Instead, go to the date that you need to change in your Journal, tap ..., then Edit Day Details, and turn on Manual plan override. Pick the day of your manual plan whose targets you want to use, and that date takes those targets. Your Journal shows a note, like "Using your Saturday's macros", so you know the date is borrowing another day's targets. The rest of your plan stays as it is, and you can turn the override off at any time.
A Manual plan never changes on its own. That's the point: your targets stay exactly as you entered them. It also means there's no weekly check-in, so as your weight and routine change, it's up to you, or your coach, to adjust them.
On the free plan, MacrosFirst offers to recalculate your targets every 10 lb (5 kg) of change toward your goal, using population averages at your new weight. See Plan Updates on the Free Plan.
With Plus, you can still see your measured expenditure on your Dashboard while you're on a Manual plan, which is a great guide when you or your coach adjust your targets. And you can switch to Autopilot or Copilot at any time to get targets that update every week from your own data.
A Manual plan puts you in charge of the numbers. These articles help you choose them and keep them on track:
"How do I pick a calorie target that matches my goal?" Setting Your Weight Goal
"How much am I actually burning?" Energy Expenditure
"How do free plan updates work?" Plan Updates on the Free Plan
"Would I rather have my targets update automatically?" Nutrition Plans
How do I know if my targets are working? On a Manual plan, the best check is your own expenditure. Once you know what you really burn, it's easy to see whether your targets fit your goal: Energy Expenditure: How MacrosFirst Measures What You Burn.
