Cass Anderson / BroBible
Audio By Carbonatix
Welcome back! This is the 5th installment of me writing about my weight loss journey with the MacroFactor App. After my friend Prasad turned me onto the app at the end of January, at a time when I weighed 190+ pounds, I have since gone down to 158 pounds, continue to build muscle while cutting fat, and I’m probably in the best shape of my adult life at this point.
In my latest MacroFactor-related article, I discussed the need for a support system/buddy system to keep you accountable but today we are going to talk about setting goals that you can actually achieve.
For this article, I will primarily be pulling from Episode 71 of the Stronger by Science podcast. That podcast is from the creators of the MacroFactor App and I recently had a road trip up the entire east coast from Florida to Maine and caught up on some old episodes. This one in particular stood out out me.
Setting Effective Weight Loss Goals With MacroFactor
When I first started using MacroFactor back on January 30th at 190+ pounds, I’d been trying to lose weight for a year while lifting regularly (without dieting). In a year, I lost 10 pounds while doing cardio 3-4x a week and lifting 4x a week.
Since I started using the MacroFactor App on January 30th, I’ve gone from 195ish pounds to 158 at 18.5% body fat and counting. My initial goal was to make it to 160 pounds but I quickly changed that to 150.
Download the MacroFactor App For iPhone or Android – use code ‘brobible’
Once I get there? Maybe I’ll reset my goal again and go lower. And without realizing what I was doing when I first started using MacroFactor I had created a goal structure that set me up for success.
Focusing On Subordinate Goals
iStockphoto / Abu Hanifah
If you are reading this article still then chances are you are looking to make some sort of a change. More often than not, people embarking on a lifestyle change want to lose weight.
The underlying reasons for that are infinite and the overarching goal there is typically ‘get healthier.’
How do you get healthier? Well, if that is the goal you can (1) lose weight, (2) eat better, (3) improve your mental well being, (4) engage in some sort of resistance/weight training, and the list goes on and on.
All of those are subordinate goals that will ultimately lead you to your main objective of ‘getting healthier.’
So, when setting your goals you want to make sure you clearly define what the overarching goal is and then you can list out the subordinate goals that will help you achieve your ultimate goal. For me, I thought ‘lose weight’ was my main goal, it was not.
In hindsight, my pursuit was to ‘get healthier’ but I hadn’t quite defined what that meant to me. Now I can say that it meant taking 35+ pounds of fat off my frame, improving my blood work, eating healthier foods, gaining muscle, becoming more active and getting outside a lot more, making friends in the gym, meeting people through the MacroFactor community on Reddit and Facebook, and the list goes on and on.
Download the MacroFactor App For iPhone or Android – use code ‘brobible’
In the aforementioned Stronger By Science podcast, they reference this analysis, How Focusing on Superordinate Goals Motivates Broad, Long-Term Goal Pursuit: A Theoretical Perspective, when talking about subordinate goals and I highly recommend giving that a read to set yourself up for success.
If you are going to listen to any portion of that podcast episode, I suggest the 43:48 to 55:07. That covers two segments where they discuss ‘Approach Versus Avoidance’ and ‘Flexible Versus Rigid Restraint.’ You can hit ‘play’ here or read on:
There is so much to take away from all of that but ultimately, my top level takeaway is that rigidity is not sustainable for the vast majority of individuals. They also have a full article breakdown of goal setting that is similar to the video for you to check out.
Of course there are always going to be people who can set a strict regimen and never stray from it but that is not the norm. Our lives are shaped by a lot more than our diet and fitness goals.
We have families, hobbies, work, interests, travel, appointments, commutes, all of this factors into our health decisions and if we try to stick to something 100% and are unable because of life/environmental factors that can have a detrimental impact on our mental health.
So what do we do?
MacoFactor
For me, this has been one of the biggest benefits of the MacroFactor App. Tracking my daily caloric intake as I log each meal and weighing myself each morning after I wake up is key.
MacroFactor has seemingly infinite pre-loaded foods in the app to choose from but also an AI feature where you can take a picture of your plate and it estimates calories highly accurately. If it has a barcode I can just scan it using the app.
Then their algorithm does the rest. By knowing my weight + calories in, it can estimate my TDEE (Total Daily Energy Expenditure) accurately over time and as my weight stalls or fluctuates the MacroFactor App makes suggestions to keep my downward weight loss trajectory.
I trust the process, I trust the app.
Download the MacroFactor App For iPhone or Android – use code ‘brobible’
I’ve been out of my normal routine for weeks now. It’s Summer. There have been lots of holidays. I have been traveling, eating, drinking, and celebrating a lot more than I did earlier in the year and my weight loss has slowed.
For a minute, it felt like it stalled but I’m still moving in the right direction. Even on my heaviest days recently where I thought I was blowing up my caloric deficit I found that I only went over my daily expenditure 2x in the past month, and I learned this from the app.
This is my past month and it by far the loosest I’ve been with daily diet, constantly going over my daily recommended calories due to things like birthdays, the 4th of July, a trip to New England, etc etc:
Cass Anderson / BroBible
Of course, your daily calories/energy balance/daily expenditure will look entirely different than mine. It is designed that way. We each have unique goals. But seeing the daily data laid out like this allows me to stay focused on long-term progress.
The Simple Math Of Weight Loss With MacroFactor
One thing we know for certain is that in order to lose weight you need to be in a caloric deficit. It is that simple, calories in need to be less than calories out (expended).
You can chase fad diets all you want and there are a million reasons to do that but if you are not in a caloric deficit you will not lose weight over time. Once you accept that, things get easy.
You need to be in a caloric deficit of 3,500/calories a week in order to lose 1 pound of fat. That’s a 500-calorie deficit each day.
There are ways you can estimate this yourself through online calculators or you can let MacroFactor do all the heavy lifting for you and adjust as you lose weight. Because your TDEE continuously goes down as you lose weight.
Think of the fat on your body like a weighted vest. It is working harder with more weight. As that fat comes off your body doesn’t have to work quite as hard and it continues to adjust over time.
You can make lifestyle changes by exercising more, and that’s natural in this process, but we all typically vastly overestimate the impact a workout session has on caloric burn. If anything, think of your workouts as icing on the cake to go along with your caloric deficit from diet.
Together, they will super charge your weight loss but I assure you that you cannot sustainably lose weight from exercise along as I used to be the poster child for thinking I could out-exercise a mediocre diet.
Lastly, I’ll say that this is the 5th article I’ve written about MacroFactor and at this point I’ve had countless people in my life reach out to me to ask if this was all some advertising thing or what…. And I assure them it is not.
This has changed my life for the better and at this point, it’s changing the lives of countless people around me (parents, friends, cousins, coworkers, etc etc). I can tell you to believe me but I don’t know you and you don’t know me.
The good news is, the first week on MacroFactor is free and if you use the promo code ‘brobible’ when signing up you will get a second week for free as well. Two weeks is plenty of time to see if this if for you or not. If it is, use that promo code for the free week.
And if you really love the MacroFactor app like I have, swing back through here and let me know how it’s been going. Shoot me an email to cass@brobible.com anytime because I’d love to hear about your journey as well!