Since MacroFactor calculates your energy expenditure based on your weight trend and energy intake, and since coaching adjustments are largely based on expenditure changes, some users wonder whether they should still log a day of eating if it will differ significantly from their normal dietary patterns. For example, if you know you’re going to eat a lot during a holiday, or if you know you plan to do a 24-hour fast, you may wonder if logging this atypical day of eating will somehow confuse MacroFactor’s expenditure and coaching algorithms.
Ultimately, it’s up to you. If you don’t want to log an atypical day of eating (because atypical days of eating often correspond with social events, where you might prefer to be fully present instead of worrying about logging your food), that’s perfectly fine. But, barring considerations related to preferences, it’s better to still log atypical days of eating.
Why it’s preferable to still log atypical days of eating
The reason for this is pretty straightforward: your expenditure is calculated based on your weight trend and energy intake. When you eat something but don’t log it, what you ate will still have an impact on your weight. But, if you don’t log what you ate, MacroFactor will have no way of knowing that your weight responded the way it did because your energy intake differed from the norm.
So, if you habitually don’t log on days when you eat considerably more than normal, MacroFactor won’t be privy to that information, and it may tend to underestimate your energy expenditure. Conversely, if you habitually don’t log on days when you eat considerably less than normal, MacroFactor won’t be privy to that information, and it may tend to overestimate your energy expenditure.
To illustrate, let’s assume you’re maintaining your weight while eating 2000 Calories per day from Sunday to Friday, and 5000 Calories every Saturday. Your average energy intake is approximately 2430 Calories per day, and, since you’re maintaining your weight, your energy expenditure is also approximately 2430 Calories per day. However, if you only log your nutrition on the days when you consume 2000 Calories, then MacroFactor will only have data suggesting that your average daily intake is 2000 Calories per day. So, it will estimate your energy intake to be 2000 Calories per day.
Ultimately, that’s actually not that big of a deal. In the scenario above (not logging one atypical day of eating every week), the basic logic discussed in this article would apply. Instead of telling you, “you need to eat 2000 Calories per day to maintain your weight,” MacroFactor’s recommendations would effectively be telling you, “you need to eat 2000 Calories per day from Sunday to Friday to maintain your weight,” since it doesn’t know what happens on Saturday. So, your expenditure would be inaccurate, but it would still be functionally useful.
Furthermore, the errors introduced by not logging one atypical day of eating on less frequent occasions typically wouldn’t be large enough to dramatically impact most goals. MacroFactor considers about 3 weeks of weight and nutrition data when calculating your expenditure and making program adjustments. So if you ate 2000 Calories per day for almost every day during a three-week span, but you consumed (and didn’t log) 5000 Calories on one day, MacroFactor would “see” that you consumed an average of 2000 Calories per day, when your actual average intake over that three-week period was about 2140 Calories. So, it would underestimate your expenditure by an average of about 140 Calories per day for approximately three weeks, and subsequently recommend slightly lower energy intakes than would be theoretically ideal for your goals. But, while not completely ideal, that’s ultimately not too big of a deal. To illustrate, if you had a goal of losing a pound per week, instead of recommending energy intakes that would actually be 100% appropriate for losing a pound per week, your recommendations would be in line with losing about 1.25-1.3 pounds per week for approximately three weeks. So, while that’s obviously not perfect, it’s also not that large of a deviation from your target rate of weight loss.
Since atypical days of eating also tend to be days that are difficult to log accurately, you might also enjoy this article from the knowledge base: What Should I Do When I Can’t Accurately Log a Meal?
So, long story short, you don’t need to be concerned that logging an atypical day of eating will negatively impact MacroFactor’s algorithms, or your coaching recommendations. In fact, logging (or at least estimating) your intake on those days would be our recommendation. Rather than negatively impacting MacroFactor’s algorithms and your coaching recommendations, logging atypical days of eating helps ensure that your expenditure and coaching recommendations are as accurate as possible. However, as discussed above, the negative impact of not logging atypical days of eating is also typically pretty small, so if you don’t want to log an atypical day of eating, you certainly don’t need to; MacroFactor’s recommendations may be slightly less accurate than normal, but they should still be pretty darn good for most people, most of the time.
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Now that you understand if it’s better to log on unusual eating days, you might enjoy one of these articles next:
What Should I Do When I Can't Accurately Log a Meal?
How Accurately Do I Need To Log My Food?