There is no way to write what I want to write without coming across like it's scolding you, so to get it out of the way, I apologize for that. I am certain you mean well and you're not lying. The most important thing in all of this is you found something that works for you.

But you didn't find universal truths. That's a danger of getting information from the Internet or from anecdote. I can give you the exact opposite anecdote. I've eaten every diet under the sun, from SAD to paleo. I've eaten no sugar. I've eaten tons of sugar. Never no fat, but the percentage of energy has varied tremendously. No processed foods at times to almost nothing but heavily processed foods. I've run over 100 miles a week at times and I've done no aerobic exercise of any kind at other times. Yet I found a post on physicsforums.com from 2003 a few weeks back from my old user account listing my height and weight at 6'2" 165 lbs. I use MacroFactor and weigh myself daily. Today, 22 years later, I was 162.4 lbs.

Why is that? I don't know. I have four cats. Two of them will eat everything you give them, then scour the entire house for more, begging and pleading the entire time. Give them infinite food and they'll eat until they puke, then eat the puke. The other two can be given infinite food and they'll stop when they've had enough and they've stayed the same size their entire lives, over a decade at this point. These are non-humans that don't give a shit about their physiques, don't feel shame, and are eating exactly the same foods with the same macro breakdowns and levels of processing. There are just genetic differences between mammals, for some reason we don't fully understand, that make overeating almost inevitable if enough food is available, without tremendous willpower and tricks like you try to employ, whereas other people will eat exactly what they need and no more, pretty much no matter what.

As for MacroFactor, things like this end up on Hacker News with no context, but it's the project of a guy named Greg Nuckols who is one of the better science communicators in the field of exercise science and has been for 15 years. He's held multiple world records as a powerlifter and has coached probably thousands of people at this point. He's also a lifelong fat person, but not really unhealthy, and as far as I'm aware, has never made much of an effort to change that. The app was created due to traditional meal planning and tracking by lifters who go through bulk and cut cycles. The way it worked in the pre-app era was to make spreadsheets weighing yourself daily and counting all of your calories, over a span of weeks. Get a moving average to remove daily water and gut content noise from the weight trend, then compare it to the average calorie intake to estimate your personal total energy expenditure. Now add or subtract from that to set targets for bulking and cutting. MacroFactor does exactly the same thing but automated most of the process for you, so all you have to do is log your food and weight.

It is not primarily meant to be a weight loss tool. It exists in large part because all other food loggers on the market at the time were exclusively targeting people trying to lose weight, and none of them personalized the targets based on estimated true energy expenditure, using population estimator formulae instead.

Saying they're trying to sell you crap you don't need is tremendously unfair. This was a tool made by a lifter for other lifters, but as it stands, the market for food loggers continues to be dominated by overweight people looking to lose weight, as there are a lot more of them in existence than there are lifters. Given that, the staff try their best to provide resources based on the best information they can find to support people who just want to lose weight. That is what this is. Maybe the information in here doesn't work for you, but it's based on research and coaching that has touched millions. It's looking at broad trends. If you know what works for you personally already, then absolutely stick with that. But you don't need to be slandering equally well-meaning people who have a very long track record of putting out the most reliable content that exists in the space they serve. Greg is in his 40s now and first became well-known in the pre-Tik Tok, pre-Instagram era. His takes on science and its limitations have been the most sober and reasonable I've encountered in any field of science, let alone the enormously fraught field of fitness now dominated by grifters. I understand why you would be skeptical or distrustful and you have no good reason to trust me any more than him. I'm just a random stranger on the web as well, possibly a sock puppet or being paid off for all you know. But his history is public. strongerbyscience.com has a back catalog of articles that stretches more than a decade. The Stronger by Science podcast is now defunct, but published hundreds of episodes. If you ever get the chance, you will never find more measured, honest content about this topic.