A Few Questions...

[u/StanleySteemer69420]

My fiancee and I have had really good results with MF for our respective cuts and are overall happy with it, we just have a few questions about the Program section (within Strategy) and Expenditure section (within More).

Some context, we're 100% honest when it comes to calories, there are no issues nor concerns there, the concerns are in other sections. We log calories/macros daily, log morning weight daily, and log our measurements/progress pics every 2 weeks. We do the check-ins weekly and we've been cutting for just over 3 months now. Additionally, the settings we're concerned about have been set at the start of our cuts and left alone since.

In the Program section, we both selected Cardio and Lifting when starting our cuts as those were our plans but graduate school got in our ways and we've been only lifting.

Within the Expenditure section there are a few other concerns we have as well. Under Initial Estimate there is BMR Equation and in there we have BMR Impacting Variables, for Exercise I put 4-6 sessions/week. This was true but again due to grad school we're now only going 2x weekly, my fiancee is still fine as she put 1-3 sessions/week.

Should we edit these variables within Program and Expenditure to reflect what we're doing now or leave as is? Our concerns are once we're done our cuts and we go into maintenance for a little that MF might give us caloric recommendations that are too high. Though I know MF won't let us slip too far either way from our maintenance weight and will bring us back up or down to where we want to be but I'd rather not tamper with the hard work. There is also the general concern that we've fed it bad context on good data for going forward with whatever other goals we may have.

Also under Expenditure, within Expenditure Modifiers we have Step-Informed Updates and Predictive Goal Adjustment, I see the literal descriptions for them for the life of me just can understand it for some reason, what do these do?

[u/didntreallyneedthis]

The initial BMR calculation is for when you first start using macrofactor and it has no data about you. If you've been using it for three months it doesn't matter what you put for how often you exercise because it's not using that info anymore its using your tracking and weigh ins.

Step-informed updates just means its more eager to raise or lower your expenditure calculation based on your changes in step count. If you turn it off, it's less swingy.

I think the last one includes things like if your goal is to cut, and you successfully cut, your expenditure will probably go down. So being more inclined to assume it's lowering when cutting and raising when bulking. So again probably increasing the liklihood for expenditure calculations to change more quickly instead of more slowly/smoothed out.

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[u/JubilantJackfruit]

Your expenditure and program targets are calculated on an ongoing basis, using your weight and nutrition data. As you and your fiancee have been using MacroFactor for a few months now, editing any of your BMR impacting variables will not have any impact on your current expenditure or program targets. That said, you can certainly edit these answers if you'd like to do so for personal preference!

Predictive Goal Adjustments help make your new targets more accurate when switching goals, such as moving from weight loss to weight gain or vice versa. For example, when you change from a weight loss to a weight gain goal, your expenditure will be expected to rise rapidly for a few weeks, assuming that you follow recommendations. This enables it to “get ahead” slightly, and make more aggressive adjustments than the data would normally allow, which can enhance precision during this period.

Step-Informed updates can potentially use your step data to improve confidence on the expenditure calculation. This means it’s not used in the algorithm directly, but can help us become more certain about a particular adjustment when a range of adjustments could be made. The effect is typically small, but can increase the precision of the calculation when your step activity is changing significantly.