Macro tracking sounds like a spreadsheet hobby. In practice it is one extra question — what was in that, roughly? — asked a few times a day, and it is the fastest way to understand why some days leave you full and energised and others leave you raiding the cupboard at 22:00.
Macronutrients are the three things in food that carry energy: - Protein — 4 kcal per gram. Builds and repairs tissue, and it is the most filling of the three. - Carbohydrates — 4 kcal per gram. Your body’s preferred fuel, especially for hard training. - Fat — 9 kcal per gram. Runs your hormones and lets you absorb vitamins A, D, E and K. (Alcohol carries 7 kcal per gram and does nothing else, which is why it shows up in a calorie count but not in a macro split.) Add the three together and you have your calories. That is the whole relationship: macros are calories with the labels left on.
Start from your daily calorie number, then work inwards: 1. Protein first: 1.6–2.2 g per kg of bodyweight if you train, or around 1.2–1.6 g per kg if you mostly want to feel full and keep what muscle you have. A 70 kg person lands somewhere between 110 g and 155 g. 2. Fat next: at least 0.6–0.8 g per kg so your hormones have what they need. For that 70 kg person, roughly 45–55 g minimum. 3. Carbs fill the rest: subtract protein and fat calories from your total and divide what is left by 4. If you would rather not do arithmetic, a 30% protein / 40% carbs / 30% fat split is a fine starting point for most people, and it is what our calculator hands you.
The difference between people who track for a year and people who quit in week two is almost never willpower. It is friction. - Log before you eat, not after. It takes the same ten seconds and it still leaves you a choice. - Save your repeats. Most people eat about a dozen meals on rotation; save each one once and the rest of the year is two taps. - Weigh the four foods that actually matter — oils, nuts, nut butters, cheese. These are dense enough that eyeballing them can be 200 kcal wrong. Eyeball the vegetables; nobody has ever been derailed by an under-measured courgette. - Log the whole meal even when you are not sure. A rough entry keeps the data honest. A missing entry makes the week unreadable.
Do not change anything for the first seven days. Eat how you normally eat and log it. What you get is a baseline — and it is usually surprising. Most people discover the same two things: they eat far less protein than they thought, and their calories are much more variable day to day than they imagined. Both are useful. Both are fixable with small swaps rather than a new diet: Greek yoghurt instead of the flavoured pot, a bigger portion of the meat you already cook, one more piece of fruit. Once you know your baseline, change one thing at a time and give it two weeks. That is how you learn what your body responds to instead of what an article told you it should.
Landing within about 10 g of protein and 20–30 g of carbs and fat is close enough. Chasing the last gram costs more attention than it returns, and precision on the wrong things is the fastest way to burn out on tracking altogether. Aim to hit protein most days, keep the calorie total in range across the week, and let the rest be a guide rather than a rule.
Put it into practice today
CoreFeed turns the logging into a daily quest — log a meal, feed your Anima, keep the streak.
Start tracking — freeNo. Weigh the calorie-dense stuff — oils, nuts, nut butters, cheese, granola — where a heaped spoon can be double what you assumed. Estimate the rest with your hand: a palm of protein, a fist of vegetables, a cupped hand of carbs, a thumb of fat. Most people are accurate enough within a week of practice.
For weight change, calories are what move the needle, so you are most of the way there. Macros decide how that change feels and what it is made of — enough protein means more of the weight you lose is fat and less of it is muscle, and it keeps you fuller on the way. If you only chase one macro, chase protein.
Log the ingredients once as a recipe, tell the app how many portions it makes, and take one portion. That turns a fifteen-minute job into a permanent two-tap entry — Sunday’s batch cook is then already logged for Wednesday.
Find the closest match in the database and take it. A restaurant estimate is imperfect, but an imperfect entry keeps the week readable, while a skipped one leaves a hole you cannot reason about later. Add a little for the oil and butter you did not see.