Partial logging is our term for what happens when you log part of the calories you consumed for the day, but not all of them.
Partial logging is one of the only things that can have a significant negative impact on MacroFactor’s coaching recommendations since MacroFactor uses your reported caloric intake, paired with changes in your trend weight over time, to calculate changes in your expenditure. This means that partial logging gives the algorithm inaccurate information, and can negatively impact the precision of the calculation.
Since MacroFactor uses the last 21 days of your nutrition data in its calculations, this means that a single partially logged day can negatively impact the precision of the expenditure calculation for about three weeks afterwards
Here’s a quick example. Let’s say that you have targets of 3000cal/day, and you ate 3000cal every day of the week for three weeks, but on one day, you partially logged and only reported 1500cal. Your actual caloric intake is 3000cal on average [3000 x 21 / 21], but your reported intake is now [3000 x 20 + 1500] / 21 = about 2929cal on average. This means that the app would reduce your expenditure estimate by about 71cal/day in response to a single day of partial logging - and each instance of partial logging within the next 21 days will increase the size of this change.
So, partial logging should be avoided whenever possible. If you are able to later estimate the missing entries to within ±30% margin of error, then this will ensure that you do not partially log, and the algorithm will not be significantly impacted (perfect logging accuracy isn’t necessary). If you don’t think you’d be able to estimate to within a ±30% margin of error, we would instead recommend deleting all entries for the day. A blank day is skipped in the algorithm’s calculations, which will minimize the negative impact of not having accurate data.
It should be noted that partial logging is NOT the same as intentionally choosing to not log small entries which contribute only a small number of calories, significantly less than the ±30% margin of error. These entries have such a small effect that choosing not to log them will not cause any issues, and the algorithm can effectively work around this.
One of the Coaching Modules that you might encounter during your weekly Check-In is the partial logging module. This module, if enabled, will check for days which look likely to be partially logged. It will then ask if you wish to mark any of these days as partially logged, which will cause them to be ignored by the algorithm. This may help you to avoid the impact of partial logging when it occurs, and give you a reminder to avoid partially logging in the future.
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