Comment by jonwinstanley
12 days ago
> when you eat more than your maintenance calories, you gain weight; when you eat less than your maintenance calories, you lose weight.
Sounds interesting.
At it's core, this idea does roughly work. But there are a lot of caveats around maintenance calories.
The main one is that not all calories are equal. 500 calories of spinach is very different to 500 calories of a McDonalds burger.
Is this something that the service is able to take in to account?
>The main one is that not all calories are equal. 500 calories of spinach is very different to 500 calories of a McDonalds burger.
It doesn’t ask what specific foods you eat, so we do not have this data.
Interestingly, that isn’t a problem. Most people follow fairly predictable eating patterns over time. We measure the effectiveness of our method by comparing the user’s target rate with the actual rate of loss or gain achieved whether that’s weight loss or weight gain.
Our data tells us 56% of users start losing weight or gaining weight (depending on set goal) within 2 weeks of using macrocodex and 95% start seeing meaningful gain and loss trend within 5 weeks.
Based on this alone, we'll probably never add more granular data collection than this.
It's not only that. Also, absorption of calories from food is largely different between individuals, due to gut microbiome, generics, etc.