Do Your Calories Feel Too Low? Too High?

Let’s start with a few assumptions about why you’re reading this article.

• You have a body composition goal you’re trying to achieve (weight loss, muscle gain, or maintenance).
• You’re using the MacroFactor app to try to achieve this goal.
• You want to optimize, audit, or understand how to accomplish this goal better.

Taking a cue from those assumptions, I want to start with a short primer on the basic facts you need to get the most out of this article (and MacroFactor).

What makes up our daily energy expenditure?

When it comes to body composition goals — be it weight loss, muscle gain, or maintenance — it all comes down to solving the equation of energy. This isn’t to oversimplify all of the varying factors that go into health, lifestyles, and economic factors. However, when everything lines up, achieving these body composition goals is a matter of Calories in and Calories out (CICO).

What makes up the factors of energy expenditure in our bodies?

There are four core factors to consider when discussing total daily energy expenditure (TDEE). You might see variations of their names in research or online, but in the simplest terms, they’re the base of our body, what we eat, and how much we move. Each of these factors makes up a certain percentage of our energy expenditure each day, and understanding how varying these contributions can be is where the importance lies.  

Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR): Basal Metabolic Rate is the energy your body needs to maintain basic physiological functions at rest, such as breathing, circulation, and cell production. This typically accounts for about 60-70% of total energy expenditure for most people.

Thermic Effect of Feeding (TEF): The Thermic Effect of Feeding refers to the energy your body uses to eat, digest, absorb, and store nutrients from food. This typically accounts for about 10% of total energy expenditure.

Exercise Activity Thermogenesis (EAT): Exercise Activity Thermogenesis is the energy expended during planned physical activities like running, weightlifting, or playing sports. This usually accounts for a relatively small percentage of total energy expenditure, but it can be a major factor for serious athletes.

Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis (NEAT): Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis encompasses the energy spent on all physical activities that are not deliberate exercise, including everyday movements like walking, household chores and even fidgeting. This is usually the second largest energy expenditure category, but its relative contribution is heavily influenced by career and lifestyle.

While most of us can’t measure each of those categories of energy expenditure directly, we can use various methods to estimate total daily energy expenditure with reasonable accuracy.

The most common methods of determining energy expenditure involve using calculators that generate estimates based on various body metrics multiplied by an activity factor (how much you move/exercise). In addition to static calculators, wearables provide estimations based on the user’s captured activity. While both of these methods can be useful, they can also produce relatively large misestimations, as discussed here and here. 

How does MacroFactor help determine my energy expenditure and Calorie targets?

When using MacroFactor, you input key personal details such as age, weight, height, gender, and activity level. This information helps establish an initial baseline for your energy needs. But, as we just discussed, this initial estimate may be too high or too low for some people.

After generating this initial estimate, MacroFactor hones in on a much more accurate and personalized estimate of your energy needs via the expenditure algorithm, which continuously and dynamically solves the energy balance equation for you. If you log your weight and food consistently and as accurately as possible, you’ll be provided with recommendations to help you achieve your goals based on your specific data. 

The app tracks your energy balance — the difference between Calories consumed and burned — and from there adjusts your Calorie and macronutrient goals. Based on your personalized results and experiences, this learning method helps you lose, gain, or maintain weight over time.

So, you were given targets: Do you think they are too high or too low?

Now that you understand a little about how the app determines your caloric targets, what happens if you think those targets aren’t accurate for you?

Everyone will have different reasons why they feel this is the case. Perhaps you’re new to tracking, or you were unaware of how your options during setup contributed to your targets. Let’s break down common issues that make people feel their targets are too low or high, along with their solutions and advice.

#1 – Brand new users and manual adjustments

If you’re new to the app but have prior tracking experience and find the initial estimates too high or low, you can adjust them to better reflect your experience. These adjustments will help the app learn and tailor its estimations based on your data.

When starting the app, MacroFactor calculates your initial estimated expenditure based on the demographic, body, and lifestyle information you provided during onboarding. While this standard formula is the best available method for initial estimates, it can still result in individual errors. And for the record, this is why MacroFactor’s expenditure and coaching features are important — they refine these estimates using your logged weight and nutrition data, offering much more accurate and personalized recommendations.

With that said, if you have a better insight than the initial numbers suggest, we encourage you to enter a manual initial expenditure estimate until the algorithm has learned enough to provide you with a personalized expenditure.

Additionally, you can enter your previous data in the app to speed up your recommendations. It takes roughly 3-4 weeks of consistently logging your nutrition and weight for MacroFactor to provide a personalized expenditure estimate. However, if you already have those 3-4 weeks of nutrition and weight data, you can input that nutrition and weight data to gain the expenditure knowledge faster.

Note that entering a manual initial expenditure will not negatively impact MacroFactor’s algorithms or program updates.

You can read more about entering a manual initial expenditure here.

#2 – Tracking accurately or partial logging

Because MacroFactor learns from your nutritional and weight input, it’s crucial to provide consistent and reasonable estimates for food intake. This approach helps you get the most out of the app and minimizes expenditure confusion. That said, there is a significant difference between accuracy and usefulness; ideally your goal should be to focus on usefulness.

Logging nutrition correctly can be tricky if you don’t have much experience with it. That said, the accuracy of your logging doesn’t have to be perfect for the app to help you reach your goals. If your logging is consistently inaccurate, the app will still adjust your targets over time to guide you toward your objectives.

To illustrate, let’s assume you do a perfect job of logging your food, you burn 2500 Calories per day, and you have a goal of maintaining weight. You eat 2500 Calories per day, log 2500 Calories per day, and your weight stays consistent, so MacroFactor will estimate that you’re burning 2500 Calories per day. In this instance, MacroFactor’s expenditure estimate (and therefore your Calorie targets) are both accurate and useful.

Now, let’s instead assume that there are a few snacks and nibbles each day that you don’t log, amounting to 200 Calories per day. So, you’re eating 2500 Calories per day, logging 2300 Calories per day, and your weight stays consistent, so MacroFactor estimates that you’re burning 2300 Calories per day, and recommends that you keep consuming 2300 Calories per day. In this instance, MacroFactor’s expenditure estimate and, therefore, your Calorie targets are somewhat inaccurate. However, they’re still useful, because when you aim to eat (and log) 2300 Calories, you actually consume 2500 Calories.

So, small logging inaccuracies are totally fine; you don’t need to log perfectly for MacroFactor to give you useful nutrition recommendations. However, if you don’t log everything, your expenditure and recommendations may end up looking like they’re too low, because they’re also accounting for the Calories you’re not logging.

But, you do need to be vigilant about avoiding partial logging. Unlike the example above, partial logging refers to not logging entire meals, resulting in significantly incorrect Calorie intake data. For example, if you log breakfast and lunch, but don’t log dinner, that would be an instance of partial logging. MacroFactor will still provide useful nutrition adjustments if your logging errors are small and relatively consistent (like the example provided above), but it can struggle if your logging errors are large and inconsistent (as is the case with partial logging).

Returning to the previous scenario, let’s assume you log everything you eat for four days per week (2500 Calories per day), but you skip logging dinner on three days, so you only log 1500 Calories. It would look like you’re maintaining your weight while eating an average of about 2071 Calories per day, which would lead to your expenditure (and therefore, your nutrition recommendations) being considerably too low.

If you find yourself in this position, the solution is simple: go back and audit your intake, estimate your energy intake for meals you didn’t log over the past couple of weeks, and just try to do a better job of logging consistently moving forward. Here is a knowledge base article on how to log previous days. 

#3 – Aggressive goal rates

While the app determines an expenditure based on your nutrition and weight input, the goal rate and macro targets are based on the user’s choices when creating a goal.

More intensive rates of weight loss (like 2+ pounds per week) require large energy deficits, which can be challenging to maintain. The same can apply to aggressive weight gain goals (which require large energy surpluses), though that’s a considerably less common challenge. This is why MacroFactor provides the green range on the slider. These ranges are more sustainable for most people. 

Example of goal screen and green slider recommendations during goal setting. This rate is expressed as a percentage of your body weight per week. For example, if you set a goal to lose 1% of your body weight per week and that equates to 2 pounds. Note, the absolute amount of weight you lose each week might slightly decrease over time (e.g., from 2 pounds to 1.96 pounds). 

That said, everyone has their own unique success or difficulty at different rates. For instance, people tend to think a 1 pound per week fat loss goal is slow, but in reality, even that can be an intensive goal, especially for a smaller individual who has a lot of life stress and a sedentary job. 

To achieve body composition goals, it’s often better to go slower and maintain adherence than to push too hard and struggle with consistency. Sometimes, dialing back the intensity ensures you hit your targets without feeling run down.

To give a more concrete example, let’s break down the difference in caloric allotment with a 1 pound per week goal versus a 0.5 pounds per week goal and a 2 pounds per week goal.

If your current maintenance caloric expenditure is 2,200 Calories per day, then these are your rough targets for different goal rates:

• 2 pounds per week goal: 1,200 Calories per day
• 1 pound per week goal: 1,700 Calories per day.
• 0.5 pounds per week goal: 1,950 Calories per day.

The difference of 250 Calories per day between losing 1 pound per week and 0.5 pounds per week may not seem significant at first glance, but it can greatly affect how manageable your diet feels. With a less aggressive goal of 0.5 pounds per week, you have more Calories to work with each day, which can make it easier to adhere to your plan and maintain your energy levels and overall well-being. Conversely, the difference between 1,700 Calories to lose 1 pound per week and 1,200 Calories to lose 2 pounds per week will likely feel like a night-and-day difference. You’ll commonly hear people say that a goal of losing “1-2 pounds per week” is a reasonable rate of weight loss, but the required energy deficit to actually lose 2 pounds per week necessitates Calorie targets that are quite low for most people.

So, if you feel like your Calorie targets are too low, and you’ve been consistently and accurately logging your food, we’d strongly advise you to reduce your target rate of weight loss.

In the next few articles, I’m going to discuss strategies to help make hitting higher or lower targets easier. However, if you think your goal of gaining or losing is too aggressive, you can adjust your targets in MacroFactor to recalibrate your Calorie needs. Editing your goal allows you to change the rate at which you want to achieve it and, therefore, the intensity of your daily deficit or surplus.

You can read more about editing your goal rate here. 

#4 – Expenditure changes based on activity changes

There are times when changes in activity levels can significantly impact intake recommendations. For example, if you had a very active job but can’t work for a period due to injury or a new job is more sedentary than your previous, your total daily energy expenditure can decrease by hundreds of Calories. Similarly, if you’re an endurance athlete whose training volume drops dramatically, like a runner reducing mileage from 100 miles per week to 30 miles per week, your energy expenditure will also see a significant change.

In these scenarios, you can adjust your intake preemptively rather than just “riding it out.” If you know your activity levels will drop, consider eating less than MacroFactor recommends for a few weeks.

Conversely, if your activity is about to increase, you might need to eat more. You can use this exercise Calorie calculator to help estimate changes during these times. If your new level of energy expenditure persists, MacroFactor will recalibrate and provide accurate recommendations again within about 3-4 weeks.

Deloads can be another instance where you might want to adjust your intake to maintenance levels. This helps manage fatigue without compromising your overall goals. You can do this by setting your goal to “maintain” temporarily or simply aligning your intake with your energy expenditure for that week, ensuring your progress chart remains unaffected.

#5 – Adjusting your expectations to counter common misconceptions

Another common issue is that people often think training and exercise burn more Calories than they actually do.

During recreational weight training, Morgan et al found you can expect to burn roughly 10-12 kJ per minute, or 2.4-2.9 kcal per minute. Over an hour of moderate-intensity lifting, that’s around 144-174 Calories burned. This applies to both men and women.

For treadmill activity, Parr et al found that energy expenditure averaged around 108.6 Calories per mile, with no significant difference between walking and running speeds. While running did burn slightly more Calories than walking, and the energy cost of walking or running does scale with body size, the 100-Calorie-per-mile estimate is a decent guideline for most people looking to track their fitness or weight loss efforts.

Now obviously, these are two snapshots. However, when considering exercise’s contribution to our overall expenditure, while it moves the needle and is important, it’s just not as drastic as some might think. Sadly, exercise and lifting do not contribute to the intensive caloric burn that people often hope they do. Don’t get me wrong, exercise will increase your caloric burn, retain (or grow) muscle, and athletes tend to have a higher BMR. That said, exercise still accounts for a small percentage of total energy expenditure for most people who aren’t exercising for 2+ hours per day

Energy compensation is also an issue. Exercise impacts your behavior and overall daily energy expenditure in various ways. For instance, a morning jog might make one person feel invigorated and more active throughout the day while making another feel tired and less active. Research shows that for every 100 Calories burned through exercise, total daily energy expenditure only increases by about 72 Calories on average. This supports the constrained model of energy expenditure, where increased exercise tends to lead to reduced energy expenditure in other areas.

The effect varies based on individual factors. If you’re relatively sedentary, burning 100 extra Calories may increase your total daily expenditure by 100 Calories, while very active individuals might see an increase of just 40 Calories. Your goals also matter: those trying to gain weight might see a greater increase in total energy expenditure compared to those aiming to lose weight.

In short, don’t be surprised if exercise has a smaller impact on your expenditure and nutrition recommendations than you may have expected.

#6 – Accepting a wider range of “normal” BMR and TDEE values

There’s a widespread belief that all adults have a BMR of at least 1200 Calories per day, so any energy intake target below 1200 Calories per day is unsafe. This belief is predicated on the assumption that consuming less than your BMR is inherently unsafe. This topic lacks scientific support, and while I won’t go into any great detail in this article, some studies (here and here) suggest we have an ability to safely go well below BMR for a period of time. This is also not to imply that faster rates of loss are better or ideal; in fact, my general stance is that slower rates of weight loss or gain are better for various reasons (that, again, are best discussed in a different article). However, this type of research is relevant when discussing the range of what is considered “too low.”

With that said, if you look at the ranges of “normal” in BMR, there is quite a bit of evidence (here and here) to suggest that BMRs below 1200 (even 900-1000) fall into the normal range. And this makes sense, especially for smaller individuals.

Much like BMR, human TDEEs also span a much wider range than many would expect. A 2021 study from Pontzer et al collated research from studies using doubly labeled water, which is the gold standard for measuring TDEE in free-living populations – it shows just how variable TDEE values can be for men and women at varying body sizes.

As an example of how variable TDEEs can be, take note of the range of values for women who weigh around 60-70 kilograms (132-154 pounds). The lowest TDEEs are around 1200 Calories per day, while the very highest (likely from a competitive athlete) was about 4800 Calories per day. Beyond the extremes, even the range of “normal” values (the biggest clump of data surrounding the trendline) covers a pretty broad range of about 1450-2900 Calories per day. Now, take note of the range for men who weigh around 80-90 kilograms (176-198 pounds). We see a couple subjects with TDEEs of about 1800 Calories per day, and a few with TDEEs exceeding 6000 Calories per day. And, beyond the extremes, even the range of “normal” values covers a pretty broad range of about 2100-3800 Calories per day.

These variations can be hard for people to accept because, at its most basic level, it highlights the food we can (or can’t) eat in a day. I will discuss this in more detail in the next article, but there are variables you can change to increase your expenditure. In the end, it may be a combination of lifestyle choices, but a good place to start is to accept our varying expenditure ranges.

#7 – Not giving the process enough time to work

Restricting Calories to achieve an energy deficit or adding Calories to build lean mass works, but it can take a while to see major results. If your goal is to maintain a caloric deficit for a long period, be aware that it could wear on your body, leading to adaptations like decreased subconscious activity and reduced training intensity. When gaining muscle, the more common issue is that progress tends to come slowly over time unless you are a new trainee.

While seeing these changes in a zoomed-out window can be easier, seeing them week after week can feel daunting. People get worn down when the scale (in either direction) isn’t showing what we feel matches the effort we are giving. It’s important to take a deep breath, and not freak out about perceived plateaus, especially if it’s only been a few weeks. Your weight will probably revert to its prior rate of change, and if it doesn’t, MacroFactor will adjust your recommendations to help you start gaining or losing at your desired rate again.

Remember that the app uses an evidence-based algorithm to determine your expenditure. The initial targets can be off, but as the app gathers more data, it will provide increasingly accurate recommendations. It doesn’t take long for the app to fall into a rhythm; from there, it simply needs the user’s application of its suggestions. In the following article, I’ll discuss how to make the application part of these processes more manageable, but for now, the overall advice is to trust the process and recommendations.

#8 – Taking a break

One final thing to consider is that intake might feel too low or high because it’s simply time to take a break. Taking a break from your diet, or even from logging entirely, can be helpful for some folks who are feeling a little burnt out. Restricting or bulking can be mentally tiring, especially when tracking every Calorie and macro.

For bulking, while not as commonly discussed, there can be plateaus, digestive discomforts, and fatigue from the push in heavy lifting and eating. Deload weeks from training can be a great time to dial back the Calories to a basic maintenance level and give yourself a breather.

When considering a break from a deficit, the amount of time needed depends on individual needs and goals. Shorter periods provide basic psychological relief, while longer breaks can help (temporarily) mitigate some of the physiological adaptations that slow down weight loss, such as reduced metabolic rate and increased hunger hormones. This article covers what you need to know about diet breaks in a weight loss context. 

It’s also important to view these breaks not just as indulgences but as planned strategic pauses. If you do well with momentum and you aren’t struggling to lose weight and stick to your diet, then you can probably keep chugging along without much concern. However, if you’re feeling worn out from the highs or lows of your intake, you may want to consider taking a break from your diet for a week or two. If this proves helpful, you could even schedule planned and recurring breaks every couple of months within your program. Timing these breaks around vacations, deloads, or at least giving yourself a blocked-off chunk of time to recuperate can really make a difference.

With each approach, the goal is simply to feel better and get to a place where you feel charged to retackle your goal or perhaps even set a new one, depending on where you find yourself at the end of the break period.

Take-home cheat sheet: Adjusting your targets

If you feel your targets are too high or low, here are some steps you can take:

Manual adjustments: If you’re a new user and confident in your understanding of your expenditure, you can make manual adjustments until the algorithm aligns with your needs.

Accurate logging: Ensure you’re not engaging in partial logging or making inaccurate estimations of food intake.

Goal rate check: Evaluate whether your goal rate is too aggressive. You control the pace; adjustments may be necessary if targets are unsustainable.

Acceptance and realism: Acceptance plays a more significant role than many expect in achieving body composition goals. This might involve accepting a lower BMR than desired or a slower, natural level of muscle building.

Patience: Body composition changes do take quite a bit of time. There is a degree of “trusting the process” that has to take place.

Taking a break: If the process makes you unhappy, consider taking a break from your deficit or surplus. It’s okay to step away and recharge.