If you enjoy intermittent fasting, there are two features in MacroFactor you’ll likely want to take advantage of.
First, if you pursue a style of intermittent fasting involving a restricted daily feeding window (for example, the popular 16/8 approach, with a 16-hour fasting period and an 8-hour feeding window each day), you may want to adjust the visible hours of your food timeline.
Your food timeline can show time slots for all 24 hours of each day, but to cut down on the amount of blank space when scrolling your food timeline, you can limit the hours shown by default. Most users would limit their food timeline to only show the hours when they’re awake. However, if you have a restricted daily feeding window, you could adjust the hour range of your food timeline to only show your desired feeding window. This little nudge may make it a little bit easier to stick to your desired feeding window.
To adjust your food timeline hour range, go to “More” –> “Food Timeline,” and then adjust your “Timeline Hour Range Default” to match your desired feeding window.
Second, if you pursue a style of intermittent fasting involving full-day fasts, you can mark your fasting days in the app, so that MacroFactor’s algorithms will recognize that you truly didn’t consume any calories on your fasting days. You only need to mark a day as fasting if both of these are true:
You didn’t consume any calories for the entire day. So, for instance, if you ate dinner on Monday night, fasted for 24 hours, and then ate dinner on Tuesday night, you don’t need to mark Tuesday as a fasting day. However, if you ate dinner on Monday night, fasted all day Tuesday, and didn’t eat again until Wednesday, you would want to mark Tuesday as a fasting day.
You don’t log any foods or beverages on your fasting days. For example, if you fasted from Monday evening to Wednesday morning, but you still logged any zero-calorie beverages or supplements you consumed on Tuesday, you wouldn’t need to mark Tuesday as a fasting day.
To mark a day as fasting, tap on the Habits widget on the dashboard, tap the day you'd like to mark as a fasting day (on the "All" or "Nutrition" view of the habits screen), and then toggle the "Are you fasting?" option.
One of the Coaching Modules that you might encounter during your weekly Check-In is the fasting module. This coaching module, if enabled, will check for days which are currently unlogged, but not marked as fasting. It will then ask if you wish to mark these days as fasted (and thus count them as 0 calorie days) or if you wish to leave them as-is (and thus have them skipped by the algorithm). This can help to ensure that your days are appropriately marked as fasted, so that the algorithm can give you the most precise adjustments possible.