Your real burn rate is already in your logs
Every tracker guesses your calorie burn from a formula. We stopped guessing. The coach reads what you actually ate against what the scale actually did — and tunes your target from that.
Ask any calorie app what you burn in a day and it will give you a confident number. That number comes from a formula — Mifflin-St Jeor, Harris-Benedict, take your pick — fed with your height, weight, age, and an “activity level” you picked from a dropdown on day one and never touched again.
The formula is fine as a starting guess. It is a terrible thing to keep trusting once you have real data. Two people with identical stats routinely differ by 300–400 calories a day in what they actually burn. The formula can’t see that. Your logs can.
Energy balance is arithmetic, not a mystery
If you log what you eat and you weigh yourself now and then, the truth is sitting right there:
- Your intake over a stretch of weeks — from your diary.
- Your weight trend over the same stretch — from your weigh-ins.
- The difference between them, in calories, is your real expenditure. Roughly 7,700 calories of imbalance moves the scale about a kilogram.
That’s it. No metabolism-guessing. It’s the same reconciliation a good coach does with a spreadsheet, and it’s what Macroline’s Coach now does for you every week.
What it actually tells you
Open Today and the coach card says something like: “You’re burning about 2,310 cal/day. Averaged 1,850 cal over 14 fully logged days, trending down 0.4 lb/wk.” Then, if you’ve set a pace goal, a suggested daily target that would get you there — and one button: Use this target.
Three design rules we held ourselves to:
It only counts honest days. Days with one entry and 300 calories aren’t “days you ate 300 calories” — they’re days you forgot to log. The math throws those out rather than pretending you have a superhuman metabolism. It needs about ten fully logged days and a few weigh-ins before it will say anything at all, and until then it tells you exactly how far along you are.
Weekly weighers are welcome. Early versions asked for weigh-ins more often than a lot of people actually step on a scale. That was our bias, not a math requirement. Four weigh-ins across three-plus weeks is enough to see a trend, so that’s the bar.
It never changes your goal by itself. Viewing the coach changes nothing. It suggests; you decide. Automation that silently rewrites your target is the fastest way to make a tracker feel like it’s working against you.
The floor is honest too
Sometimes the math points below where anyone should eat. When it does, the coach holds the line at a floor and says so — “held at 1,200 rather than the math’s suggestion.” No silent clamping. If a number is being adjusted for your safety, you get to know that.
The result is a target that moves with you. Lose weight, and your burn rate drops a little — the coach notices and adjusts, gently, one week at a time. Hit a plateau, and instead of guessing why, you can see it: intake crept up, or the trend flattened. The numbers show their work.
Your logs already know how your body works. The coach just does the reading.