What Are Macros?
Macros — short for macronutrients — are the three main categories of nutrients your body uses for energy and function:
- Protein (4 calories per gram) — builds and repairs muscle tissue
- Carbohydrates (4 calories per gram) — primary fuel source for intense exercise
- Fat (9 calories per gram) — hormones, cell function, fat-soluble vitamins
When people talk about "tracking macros," they mean logging the grams of protein, carbs, and fat they eat each day — rather than just counting total calories.
Why bother with macros instead of just calories? Because the *composition* of your calories matters. Two diets with identical calorie counts but different macro splits will produce different results for muscle gain, fat loss, and performance.
Step 1: Set Your Calorie Target
Before you can set macros, you need to know your total daily energy expenditure (TDEE) — the number of calories you burn in a day.
A reasonable starting formula:
Bodyweight (lbs) × 14–16 = maintenance calories
- Lower end (×14) if you're mostly sedentary outside training
- Upper end (×16) if you're active throughout the day
From there:
- To build muscle (lean bulk): Add 200–300 calories above maintenance
- To lose fat (cut): Subtract 300–500 calories below maintenance
- To maintain: Stay at maintenance
Don't over-engineer this. These are starting estimates. You'll adjust based on real-world results after 2–4 weeks.
Step 2: Set Your Macro Targets
Protein first — always. Protein is the highest-priority macro for gym-goers. Aim for 0.7–1g of protein per pound of bodyweight per day. For most people lifting 3–5 days per week, 0.8g/lb is a reliable target.
Example: 170lb person → 136–170g protein per day.
Fat next. Fat is essential for hormonal health and shouldn't be cut too low. A reasonable floor is 0.35–0.45g per pound of bodyweight. Going much lower than 20–25% of total calories can affect testosterone and recovery.
Carbohydrates fill the rest. Once protein and fat are set, the remaining calories go to carbs. Carbs fuel your training — don't be afraid of them if you're lifting regularly.
Example macro setup (170lb, 2400 cal maintenance, lean bulk at 2650 cal):
| Macro | Grams | Calories |
|---|---|---|
| Protein | 150g | 600 |
| Fat | 75g | 675 |
| Carbs | 344g | 1375 |
| Total | | 2650 |
Step 3: Log Your Food
This is where most beginners get stuck. Here's the practical reality:
Weigh food when possible. A kitchen scale ($15–20) makes your logging significantly more accurate than eyeballing. Weigh protein sources especially — there's a big difference between 100g and 150g of chicken breast.
Use a barcode scanner. Most calorie tracking apps include barcode scanning for packaged foods. This removes most of the manual entry friction for processed and packaged items.
Build a rotation of known meals. Most people eat roughly the same 20–30 foods repeatedly. Once you've logged these foods a few times, future logging becomes very fast. You're not discovering new foods daily — you're logging familiar ones.
Log before you eat. Pre-logging your meals for the day (morning or the night before) lets you see where you're tracking before you've committed to anything. It also removes the decision fatigue of figuring out what to eat mid-day.
Photo logging is the shortcut. Apps like Soma let you photograph a meal and get macro estimates from the image using AI. For home-cooked meals or restaurant food where barcode scanning doesn't apply, this cuts logging time dramatically.
Step 4: Review and Adjust
Macros aren't a one-time calculation. After 2–4 weeks, compare your actual results (weight trend, body composition, performance) to your targets:
- Weight trending up faster than expected? Reduce calories by 100–150/day.
- No weight change despite eating at a surplus? You may have underestimated your TDEE — increase by 100–150/day.
- Performance declining on a cut? Consider adding 20–30g carbs, particularly pre-workout.
- Not hitting protein targets? Add a protein shake or prioritise higher-protein meals.
The goal isn't a perfect macro split on every single day. The goal is hitting your targets *on average* across the week.
Common Beginner Mistakes
Tracking everything except drinks. Milk, juice, protein shakes, and yes — alcohol — all have macros and calories. Log them.
Eyeballing portions. "A handful" of almonds can vary from 20g to 60g. Weigh until you've calibrated your eye well enough to estimate accurately.
Logging the cooked weight of raw ingredients. 100g of raw chicken becomes roughly 70–75g cooked. Look for entries that specify raw vs cooked, or weigh before cooking.
Chasing perfection. If you hit protein and calories within 5–10% most days, you're doing well. Don't let a bad logging day derail the whole week.
Quitting because it's tedious. The first week is the hardest. By week three, logging a day's food takes 10–15 minutes. The skill compounds with repetition.
Do You Need to Track Macros Forever?
No. Most experienced lifters track during cuts (when precision matters) and work from intuition during maintenance. After 3–6 months of consistent tracking, you develop a strong enough sense of portion sizes and food composition to eyeball things reasonably well.
Tracking is a skill. You're building it, not committing to it forever.
The Easiest Way to Start
If you want to make macro tracking as painless as possible from day one, use an app that combines quick logging options — barcode scanning, photo tracking, and a large food database — with a clean interface that doesn't require a manual in order to use it.
Soma combines photo calorie tracking (snap your meal, get macros), barcode scanning, and AI-powered food search, alongside full workout tracking so your nutrition data is always in context with your training.