@mike22475 Lose It! is a very good app! Calorie management works for both gaining & losing weight because that's the key measurement tool for growth, loss, and maintenance. And the good news is, calories is a simple formula!
- Protein + Carbs + Fats = Calories
So if you're interested in macros, you're really only going from one number to three numbers that add up to that one number, which means you're still hitting your daily calorie goal, just in a little more specific way to make sure you're feeding your body the correct amount of protein etc. for supporting your loss/maintenance/gain goal & dialing up your energy.
Granted, it requires a little more work because it's a minor hassle to count more stuff, but if you want to dip your toes in the macros water, you can do it right from the Lost It! app! Just open the app, go to Log, tap the down arrow on the Calories header, and it will show you protein/carbs/fats, where you can create a goal for one or more if you'd like:
My recommendation is to do what you're comfortable with, and chip away on learning & doing more over time (unless you just want to go whole-hog). For me, a big part of macros was the familiarity aspect, which means I just had to get used to doing it by becoming familiar with how it works in practice, so if you're already doing calorie-counting, that's a HUGE first step in taking control over your physical body & your internal energy.
Macros can be daunting because it appears to be more complex, but nearly every food you buy has the macros printed on the nutrition label, and the more natural stuff like eggs & chicken can either be weighed on a scale and/or looked up on an app. A couple other good apps are MyFitnessPal & MyMacros+.
Personally, at the moment, I just do it on paper, due to my meal-prep system. I like at cooking as a production job: if you eat 3 meals a day (breakfast, lunch, and dinner), then you're on the hook for 21 meals a week, every week for the rest of your life. That's over a thousand meals a year.
Because I'm on a budget (and because it's so easy to spend hundreds of dollars a month on fast food), I like to use meal-prepping as a tool to (1) hit my macros every day, (2) make delicious food, and (3) save money. So my current approach is:
- Cook one small batch of food a day, such as a dozen homemade granola bars or three pounds of pulled pork, and then freeze or otherwise store it. I write the macro information on the packaging.
- I have a giant insulated lunchbox (pricey, but lifetime warranty!) & load up all of my meals for the day in it.
This ensures two things:
- I never have to do an overwhelmingly big meal-prep job. Just one recipe a day, usually after I get home from work, and usually using cheat tools like the Instant Pot to automate cooking, lol.
- I always have delicious, macro-friendly food available for my preferred eating times.
For me, if I eat a whole plate of food, I get a little bit sleepy, so I like to do smaller meals for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, then have snacks in-between. Plus I'm not super hungry when I wake up, so I do a small morning snack before breakfast, and I almost always have dessert every day after dinner, so my total eating times is 7.
Utilizing a simple meal-prep approach that spreads the work out over time, and then labeling the results, means that all I have to is do some simple math on a piece of paper in the morning, so I can grab some overnight outs out of my fridge for my morning snack, a breakfast burrito for breakfast, some carrots & hummus for my brunch snack, etc.
But I only got to this point after going through a lot of trial & error, which is why it kind of all boils down to familiarity - if you can ease yourself into tracking your calories, then add say protein, then do the other macros, then figure out a meal-prep system that works for you in terms of actually being useful, then the combination of macros + a meal-prep system basically gives you full control over your physique & really amps up your daily energy levels!
On a tangent, I also made the somewhat shocking discovery that
food = mood. Food controls like 90% mood during a day. I didn't realize this growing up because there's a time delay between when you eat & how it makes you feel (have energy or not having energy, being lethargic, being moody, etc.).
I suspect most people will unfortunately never make this correlation because of that delay (usually impacts your mood a few hours after eating), especially because I was clueless until I had already been doing macros for awhile, so it's not readily apparent! What I found was that consistently hitting my macros throughout the day meant that I could keep both my mood & my energy elevated 24/7. I'm a very low-energy person by default, so this was a pretty big revelation that I could control my energy & also how I felt, mood-wise, through food.
Something like 90% of your neurotransmitters are generated in your stomach & set up to your brain, so it makes sense that what you eat has a strong impact on how you feel, and because hardly anyone reliably hits their macros on a daily basis, we have a huge culture of quick-fixes: drive-thru takeout, vending machines, 5-hour energy, energy drinks, energy bars, etc., because we all are looking for an easy boost to make us feel better, when we in reality we can have full control over how we feel by controlling how (not what) we eat.
With macros, we have the freedom & opportunity to feel good all day long! For me, this was a pretty life-changing tool to have in my life, because it meant that I could give myself the ability to have energy in the morning, afternoon, and evening, and be able to do more stuff with my life than just being a couch potato. Again, growing up with low energy (health issues), this was a pretty big deal for me. So it's not just about controlling your physique & bodyweight, but about your energy & your mood too!
Feeling good feels GOOD! And being able to consistently control feeling good is amazing!