Calorie and macro tracking for athletes

Short answer: for athletes who weigh their food, tracking calories and macros shouldn’t be the slow part. With Fabee you type it the way you’d write it on your meal plan, “180 g raw chicken breast, 250 g cooked rice, 10 g olive oil”, and it logs each food at the exact weight. No database to search, no picking between twenty “chicken breast” entries. And on top of the log, it works like a coach who knows your plan.

This is for fighters, runners, cyclists, team-sport players, CrossFitters, anyone on a strict plan from a coach. Lifting for size or a show? The bodybuilding guide is here.

Why precision matters when you compete

For most people, close enough is fine. For you, the margins are smaller:

• Making weight, the scale on weigh-in day doesn’t care about estimates.
• Training once or twice a day, under-fuelling shows up as flat sessions and slow recovery.
• On a coach’s plan, “about right” isn’t the plan.

The errors that hurt are rarely the big ones. They’re the small ones that repeat every day:

• Raw vs cooked. 100 g of raw rice has roughly 360 calories. 100 g of cooked rice has about 130, because it’s full of water. Log one as the other and you’re off by almost three times. The same goes for meat, which loses water as it cooks.
• Oil. 10 g of olive oil is about 90 calories. Two “splashes” a day you don’t log is a small meal.
• The wrong database entry. User-added entries vary a lot. Pick the wrong one and you carry that error at every meal.

With Fabee, you say whether you weighed it raw or cooked, and it uses the right numbers.

How much protein athletes need

For most people who train, the International Society of Sports Nutrition (Jäger et al., 2017) puts protein at 1.4 to 2.0 g per kg of body weight a day. When you’re losing weight and already lean, for example ahead of a weigh-in, needs go up to hold on to muscle.

Spread it out: 20 to 40 g per meal for most people, with some protein soon after training. Work out your exact number here, or use the protein calculator.

Carbs: your training fuel

For most sports, carbs decide how hard and how long you can train. Most athletes train harder and feel less tired with more carbs, and need more on heavy training days than on rest days.

If you’re not sure what suits you, test it: two to four weeks a bit higher in carbs, mostly around training, then two to four weeks lower. Track how you train, recover and feel, and keep what works.

How much you need scales with how much you train. A rest day needs far less than a double session or a long run, so many athletes eat more carbs on hard days and fewer on easy ones.

Simple, fast carbs have their place here too: around hard sessions, between events or rounds of a tournament, or when you need to refuel quickly. The rest of the time, mostly slow, high-fibre carbs.

Making weight: boxers, fighters, weight-class athletes

Most fighters compete below their walking weight. The safest way there:

• Start early. Lose most of the weight slowly, over weeks, as fat, not in the last days.
• Plan the last week with your coach, around the time you’ll have between weigh-in and the fight. The more recovery time you have, the more you can safely drop and regain. The less time, the less you should cut at the end.
• Be careful with water cuts. Losing just a few percent of your body water already cuts strength and endurance, and bigger losses are dangerous. If you rely on a big cut, work with a sports dietitian, not an app.

Fabee helps with the long part: hitting your numbers day after day for weeks, and showing you the trend.

Eating too little costs you performance

Under-eating is common in sports where weight matters, and it doesn’t just slow fat loss. When your body doesn’t get enough energy for training and daily life, it cuts back elsewhere: hormones, periods in women, bone health, immunity, recovery and performance. Sports doctors call it relative energy deficiency in sport (RED-S).

If your sessions feel flat, you’re always sore, sick a lot, or your period has changed or stopped, you may be eating too little for how much you train. Talk to your doctor or a sports dietitian.

Hydration on long and hard days

For most training, water with meals and when you’re thirsty is enough. For sessions over an hour of hard work, or long endurance days, add a drink with some carbs and electrolytes, not just plain water. Sip through the session rather than chugging at the end: your gut can only absorb so much at once.

How Fabee fits a strict diet

• Exact grams. Type the weights from your scale and it logs each food at that weight, raw or cooked.
• Every macro, every meal. Protein, carbs and fat per food and per meal, and what’s left for the day.
• Fix it in one sentence. “That was 200 g, not 250” and the card updates.
• It remembers your rules. Your coach’s plan, a nut allergy, training at 6 pm, fight week. Tell it once.
• It looks things up. Eating out on the road, at a tournament? It finds the restaurant’s own numbers.
• It sees the trend. Ask how your week went and it answers from your real log, next to your weight.

Now in Fabee: a barcode scanner, and Apple Health (sleep, activity, weight, glucose and cycle). Coming next: vitamins and minerals.

Fabee is iPhone first, with Android planned. Download it on the App Store, and if you’re new to all this, start with how many calories you should eat a day.