Table of Contents
About MacroFactor
The fitness industry is rife with fluff. I’m not just talking about guys who have added fluffy weight to their lats through less-than-honorable procedures, though that’s certainly one dilemma.
No, I’m talking about the rampant spread of confusing and contradictory information regarding nutrition and dieting. People hear words like body recomposition, calorie deficit, macronutrients, and surplus, and they melt away into puddles.
It can feel impossible to learn the proper way to lose (or gain) weight, and apps like My Fitness Pal aren’t always the best trainers.
Thankfully, MacroFactor is looking to change the game. They offer a no-nonsense, judgment-free nutrition tracking application that puts as much control into users’ hands as they’d like.
The app was developed by the Stronger By Science team, a well-respected and trusted squad in the internet fitness community. They’ve partnered with athletes like Jeff Nippard, Travis Cooper, and Jessica Buettner, and earned praise from publications like Lifehacker.
Their Instagram page has amassed over 2.9k followers and has shaken up the online fitness world over the past few months. However, in spite of all the praise, one still has to wonder whether MacroFactor truly has the sauce, or if they’re just a cream-filled dream like a soggy Boston Cream donut.
My MacroFactor review will look at what the app can do for users, how it helps people reach their weight loss or muscle gain goals, what makes it unique amongst its competition, what customers think about it, and whether I ultimately think it’s worthy of acclaim or just another flash in the pan application.
Overview of MacroFactor
If you don’t already know who Greg Nuckols and Eric Trexler are then I’d recommend closing this MacroFactor review for the time being and listening to the latest episode of their Stronger By Science podcast.
Both men have decades of experience in bodybuilding, powerlifting, dieting, and the fitness space. They’re also massive nerds who love diving into the science behind exercise and nutrition. However, they’re cognizant enough to realize that not everyone has the time or attention span that they do to learn about how one can control their weight.
That’s why they launched MacroFactor in 2021. They wanted to help people reach their goals, whether that’s gaining muscle, losing fat, or simply becoming better at monitoring their eating.
MacroFactor can do all those things without unintentionally promoting the hyper-obsessive behaviors that other tracking apps do.
Nuckols and Trexler want to encourage people to push themselves by handling the majority of the work. They don’t want people to stress about how many calories they should eat, whether they’re getting enough protein, or why the scale isn’t showing the number they want to see.
Thus, they created an app that could handle those dilemmas for users. MacroFactor is an app that can track your food intake, give you approximate caloric and macronutrient goals, and take the guesswork out of weight fluctuations.
MacroFactor looks to be a breath of fresh air in the fitness space, but what sets them apart? I’ll cover some of its most distinguishing features in the next section of this MacroFactor review.
Highlights
- Reliable and accurate food database
- You can manually enter the macronutrients of food not found in the database
- Extremely detailed and comprehensive user guide
- Coaching plans that give users as much help as they want
- Goal-neutral approach to reinforcement
- Free two week trial period
MacroFactor Review
The easiest way for us to explain how MacroFactor works is by comparing what it does to the most popular app in this market, My Fitness Pal.
The two have the same goal (to help people lose weight) and the same general outline (allow people to log their food intake to measure their calories), but it’s when you go deeper into the details that MacroFactor begins to shine.
Simply put, My Fitness Pal is you, and MacroFactor is the guy your girlfriend told you not to worry about. The app is deep and robust in its functionality in a way that puts other apps to shame.
MacroFactor has a complete food database with accurate information on any particular food’s calories, macronutrients, vitamins, and mineral contents. This applies to most foods and products from restaurants and fast food establishments.
If you can’t find a particular item on the app then you can simply scan the barcode and MacroFactor can match it to the correct corresponding information.
If by some act of God MacroFactor doesn’t recognize the barcode then it allows users to manually enter the food’s calories, protein content, fat content, and grams of carbs.
And if you’re really too lazy to even type out what you ate, then you can verbally describe your meal to MacroFactor and the app will do its best to match your meal to the appropriate information.
You can also create recipes and save them to the database. These recipes are only saved to your account, which is another advantage that MacroFactor has over My Fitness Pal.
The latter can sometimes provide inaccurate information because anyone can upload their recipes to the app’s database, increasing the margin of error via human calculation.
MacroFactor doesn’t have that issue. You won’t accidentally eat too many calories if you use the information they provide in their database because all their entries are verified by their staff.
This app allows users to track all their foods by the time of day. This can give people a better insight into their eating habits. It also makes it easier to adhere to an eating schedule because you can copy and paste meals to different times and days.
Now, let’s get into the exciting part of this MacroFactor review: the app’s coaching capabilities. The issue with many food tracking apps is that that’s all they can do.
They’re great food logs, but if you don’t know how many calories you should be eating to reach your goal, then they won’t do much for you.
MacroFactor offers three different coaching plans:
- Coached
- Collaborative
- Manual
I’ll start with the manual method because it’s the easiest to understand. MacroFactor will take a hands-off approach, giving you full control over everything.
This method is great for people who know exactly how much they need to eat to reach their goals and just want to use the app as a calorie tracker.
Coached and collaborative plans both start at the same place. You’ll enter your personal information first:
- Height
- Weight
- Activity levels
- Goals
- Ideal goal rate
- Body fat percentage
- Type of exercise
- Exercise frequency
You can connect MacroFactor to your FitBit or Health app to help it collect more information about your activity habits. From there, you can pick either the coached or the collaborative plan.
The former option gives control over to MacroFactor. They’ll give you an ideal breakdown of daily calories, protein, fat, and carbs based on your goals and preferences.
You can adjust the rate at which you want to either gain or lose weight at any time if you feel that you’re eating too much or not enough.
This program will update your caloric budget every week based on changes in your weight and energy level. That means that it can help prevent plateaus by giving you a clear path to follow.
MacroFactor’s collaborative program requires a bit more effort on your end but it gives you more input while making the most of Macrofactor’s algorithms. The app will give you a weekly calorie budget that you can disperse however you like.
This is great for people who enjoy eating out with their friends on the weekend because it means that they can allot more calories to that day by subtracting calories from another day.
It is also an ideal setup for people who know themselves and their goals but like MacroFactor’s coaching style.
Finally, MacroFactor estimates your daily energy expenditure by measuring your daily caloric intake, how much activity you get in a day (by pulling information from your connected fitness apps), and how your body weight changes.
This is such a huge advantage because it means that you get a decently accurate idea of how many calories you burn in a day without having to do any calculations on your own.
MacroFactor can provide more accurate estimations based on how much information you give them, and they’ll even show you how confident they are in each day’s approximate caloric output.
After your free trial expires then you’ll have three possible payment options:
- A monthly subscription that costs $12 per month
- A yearly subscription that comes out to $6 per month on average
- A six-month subscription that averages out to $8 every month
Who Is MacroFactor For?
MacroFactor is for anyone who wants to learn more about diet, nutrition, and how they can influence their weight and/or body composition.
The app grants as much freedom as customers want, meaning that you can let MacroFactor do all the work for you, or you can just use it as a food journal.
MacroFactor Reviews: What Do Customers Think?
Reading about this makes it seem too good to be true at some points, so I wouldn’t blame you for feeling a little skeptical during this MacroFactor review. However, I wanted to provide you with a wider range of opinions beyond our own.
I looked at customer MacroFactor review scores from across the internet and assembled the aggregate ratings into this list:
- Over 1,200 customers gave the app an average score of 4.8/5 stars on Appgrooves
- Over 780 customers gave the app an average score of 4.8/5 stars on the Google Play store
- Over 420 customers gave the app an average score of 4.7/5 stars on the Apple App store
One thing that customers adored about MacroFactor was the app’s intuitive algorithms.
MacroFactor performed all the complex calculations like determining someone’s daily energy expenditure, distributing their macronutrients evenly, and producing a realistic daily caloric intake goal based on a few pieces of information that users entered.
People loved how smooth that process was because it meant that they didn’t need to do the math themselves. They didn’t have to waste mental energy doing eldritch equations, meaning they could save that energy for the gym.
This also applied to how MacroFactor adjusted values in relation to the user’s progress. The app can increase or decrease how many calories it recommends to you based on trends in your activity, scale weight, and body fat percentage.
This was a huge draw for customers because it meant that they didn’t have to run damage control if they started to plateau. They trusted that MacroFactor would handle everything for them.
It also encouraged them to record more of their habits in the app so that they could provide the algorithms with as much information as possible. This positive MacroFactor review from the Apple App store touches on that note:
“The food database and barcode scanner has made it much easier for me to track accurately, and the daily macro targets offer me enough structure to be useful but not so much that I feel the need to meticulously plan every meal and snack.”
That same review also said that the app eased their nerves around weight fluctuations. They further wrote, “The adaptive TDEE and weight trend features have helped calm a lot of my anxieties about short term plateaus and small upward spikes in weight, and allowed me to maintain a smaller calorie deficit that’s far less draining while still trending downward.”
Users liked how MacroFactor used a goal-neutral approach. The app simply states what it recommends for users to do in order to reach their goals. It doesn’t congratulate people for adhering to their goals nor does it degrade people for having off days (something that everyone does).
Plenty of people were genuinely motivated by the app’s pragmatic approach to weight maintenance. MacroFactor is objective in tone and language, and that helped people adopt a more realistic view of their weight loss.
They didn’t see the numbers on the scale as moral judgments. In fact, many people learned that the scale numbers as just numbers, and grew more comfortable with weight fluctuations because MacroFactor provided so much information.
Here’s one 5/5-star MacroFactor review that mentions that specific point among other compliments:
‘The dynamic calorie expenditure feature alone puts it above other apps, but there’s so much more. The ease of use is a game changer. It’s so fast to track food that you will actually do it. Also, the non-judgemental design is a huge plus. No guilt from the app if you go over.”
MacroFactor was consistently praised for being easy to use. People said that its clean design and simple layout were a breath of fresh air compared to other fitness apps.
I’ll wrap up this section of this MacroFactor review with a customer testimonial that touches on that aspect:
“The iOS design is very user friendly even more so than MFP. I enjoy the dark mode, the dynamic sense, and instead of making spreadsheets and figuring out what exact routine to follow to hit 0 calories or to not surpass x amount of calories just to figure out one week you ate too little and another too much.”
Is MacroFactor Legit?
The brand’s team is always reaching out to customers who wrote MacroFactor reviews to answer their questions. They take consumer feedback to heart and use it to improve their product. That practice alone showed us that they’re a legit brand.
Is MacroFactor Worth It?
MacroFactor is host to an overwhelming number of positive attributes that could crown it as the king of food tracking apps.
Its incredibly detailed food database, the freedom it grants users in terms of tracking meals and food content, its coaching plans, its intelligent algorithms, and its fair price all help it earn its spot on the podium.
MacroFactor Promotions & Discounts
At the time of this MacroFactor review, all I could find was the free two-week trial period that every new user can access when they download the app. Use the code SBS to sign up for this two-week trial.
Where to Buy MacroFactor
You can download MacroFactor on the Apple App Store or the Google Play Store.
FAQ
Who owns MacroFactor?
MacroFactor is owned by founders Greg Nuckols and Eric Trexler.
What is MacroFactor’s Privacy Policy?
MacroFactor uses personal data for tracking Google analytics and for detecting bugs.
What is MacroFactor’s Refund Policy?
Users can terminate their MacroFactor subscription at any time. However, the company will not provide any refunds. They will simply end the customer’s subscription once the current payment period expires.
How to Contact MacroFactor
I’ll conclude this MacroFactor review by listing out all the ways that you can contact the brand if you have any remaining questions or queries.
You can message the brand directly on their Instagram account. Their staff is also active on the app’s subreddit, r/macrofactor. That may be the most reliable way for you to contact them if you don’t already have the app.
If you’ve already downloaded MacroFactor then you can contact the developers directly through the app.
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