How We Calculate Your Macros (And Why It Actually Works)
By Adi · April 8, 2026
Understanding how your calorie and macro targets are set — and why staying consistent with logging and weighing yourself makes all the difference.
Your Macros Are Calculated For You. Here's How It Works
When you set up Macros, we ask a few simple questions: your weight, height, age, sex, activity level and goal. You can add your body-fat percentage if you know it, and tell us if you train as an athlete. From that we work out two things: your daily calories and your protein, carbs and fat. Or you can skip all of it and type in your own numbers.
Either way, it's a first guess. A good one, but still a guess. The part that makes it accurate comes later, from your own data.
Step 1: Your Starting Calories
First we estimate how many calories your body burns at rest. We use a published equation built on your weight, height, age and sex. If you know your body-fat percentage, we switch to an equation built on your lean mass, because lean tissue does most of the burning. Athletes get their own lean-mass equation.
Then we multiply that by your activity level: from 1.2 if you mostly sit, up to about 1.7 if you're very active, a little higher if you train as an athlete. That gives your estimated daily burn, often called your TDEE.
Then your goal sets the number you eat:
- Fat loss. You pick a weekly pace, and we take it off your daily burn, using about 7,700 calories per kilogram (3,500 per pound). The pace is capped at 1% of your body weight a week, 0.5% if you're under 18. Faster than that, more of what you lose tends to be muscle.
- Muscle gain. A small surplus, about 325 to 550 calories a day depending on the pace you pick, capped at 0.5% of your body weight a week. Muscle is built slowly, and a big surplus mostly adds fat.
- Maintain. You eat what you burn.
Whatever the goal, your target never goes below 1,200 calories.
Step 2: Protein, Carbs and Fat
Protein comes first, set by your body weight: 2.2g per kg (1g per pound) by default, and that includes fat loss. It's the top of the range research links to muscle gain from training (Morton et al., 2018), and protein matters even more when you eat less, because it helps you keep the muscle you have. You can choose 1.6g per kg if you prefer less, or 2.6g per kg for athletes and aggressive phases. Athletes building muscle start there.
Carbs and fat share the rest. By default the calories left after protein split 60% carbs and 40% fat. You can lean either way: more carbs for performance, or more fat if that's how you like to eat. Protein never drops below 50g a day and fat never below 20g, even if you set your numbers by hand.
Step 3: The Weekly Review Finds Your Real Number
Here's the truth: your body doesn't follow a spreadsheet. Two people with the same age, height and weight can burn quite different amounts in a day. No equation can see that. Your data can.
Every Sunday or Monday the weekly review compares what you ate with how your weight trend moved over roughly the last three weeks. The logic is plain energy balance. If you averaged 2,300 calories a day and your weight held steady, you burn about 2,300. If you lost half a kilogram a week, you burned about 550 more a day than you ate.
The 7,700-calories-per-kg rule is too simple for predicting months ahead, because your body adapts as you lose. That's exactly why the review checks again every week instead of trusting one calculation.
A few things it does on purpose:
- It reads the trend, not the morning. Your weight is smoothed across weigh-ins, so one salty dinner doesn't move anything. If a week looks off, it waits for a second week before reacting.
- It only counts full days. A day you skipped is filled in with your usual day. A day that looks far lower than usual gets a question: "Was this a full day?" If there aren't enough full days, it leaves your target alone.
- It suggests. You decide. You'll see a new target with Update target and Keep current target, or "No change needed this week". Changes come in small steps, and it never changes your target on its own.
- Your split stays yours. When calories change, your protein per body weight and your balance of carbs to fat stay the way you set them.
- Maintaining? It holds you within a small band around your weight (about 1% of your body weight, and at least 1.5 pounds either side) and only eases calories when your weight keeps drifting for two weeks.
The review can only be as honest as your logs. For the habits that make it accurate, read How to Track Macros Right: Why a Half-Logged Day Is Worse Than an Empty One.
Safety Is Built In
- Weekly pace capped at 1% of body weight for fat loss (0.5% under 18) and 0.5% for muscle gain, in setup and in the weekly review.
- Never below 1,200 calories, 50g protein or 20g fat, even when you edit your numbers by hand.
- Pregnant or breastfeeding? Adi.fit doesn't calculate calories for you. Needs change a lot from person to person, and that's a job for your doctor, midwife or dietitian. Enter the numbers they give you, and the weekly review stays off.
The Bottom Line
Your starting macros aren't magic numbers. They're a hypothesis. Your job is to test it: log whole days and weigh in the same way each time. The weekly review does the rest, and every honest week makes your numbers a little more yours.