Macros that move when your weigh-ins say so

Your weight trend moves your calories. One bad morning does not.

Daily scale weight is noise. Water, salt, sleep, a late dinner: any of them swing it a couple of pounds overnight with nothing underneath actually changing. So nothing reacts to a single reading.

At each weigh-in, MuscleBuddy averages your last seven weigh-ins and compares that to the seven before them, then turns the difference into a rate per calendar week. Weigh in daily and that is this week against last week; weigh in weekly and it takes about ten weigh-ins before there is a trend to read, and the app tells you how many are left. That gives a trend: pounds (or kilos) per week, real movement instead of this morning's number. The trend gets checked against the rate your current goal calls for, and there is a band around that rate you're allowed to sit in. Inside the band, nothing changes. Outside it, carbs move by about 150 kcal in the direction that closes the gap. Cutting at a pound a week and drifting at 0.3? Carbs come down. Dropping faster than the plan? They go back up.

Some blocks never auto-adjust at all. Maintenance and deload phases are supposed to hold steady, so MuscleBuddy leaves them alone rather than chasing a number that was never the point. Recomp is different: its target is holding your weight level, so calories move only when the trend drifts more than half a pound a week either way, and always back toward level.

Reverse diet, carb cycling, and contest prep

One approach doesn't fit every phase, so three modes sit alongside the default cut / bulk / maintain logic. Each is part of Pro.

Reverse diet walks calories back up in small steps after a long deficit. You choose the step size, or your coach sets it for you, and you take each step when you are ready: a step a week is the usual pace, and the app allows at most one a day. Each step keeps your macro split, and while the reverse diet runs your weigh-ins are tracked but never cut the calories back out from under it. You decide when you have reached maintenance and stop. It is a slow, deliberate way back up, not a promise about what your metabolism will do.

Carb cycling assigns high, medium, and low carb days across the week, lined up with the days you train: high carbs land on your training days and low ones on your rest days, whichever days those are. Protein stays put; fat fills whatever the target has left. The ratios and the day mapping are yours to set.

Contest prep sequences a long deficit, peak week, and a structured rebound. It's built for physique athletes, and a coached athlete's phase transitions wait on their coach's approval; a self-coached athlete's apply directly and are always reversible.

Log food without typing macros

MuscleBuddy ships a curated food catalog of single ingredients, common cooked dishes, and a growing list of branded items, and it's free. So are recipes: build a meal from its ingredients once, save it, and log it as one thing forever after. Eat half a portion and it scales; log it twice and it doesn't double-count an ingredient.

Pro adds the parts that save the most typing. Scan a packaged food's barcode and its verified nutrition comes straight from Open Food Facts and USDA FoodData Central, with no typing at all. Meal plans build from your macro targets and the foods you actually eat, so the suggestions aren't a spreadsheet of chicken and broccoli. And micronutrients get daily targets with percent coverage, instead of just totals.

All of it logs offline. Log a meal in a gym basement or on a plane; it syncs when you're back on a signal. Nothing waits on a connection, and nothing gets lost.

What nutrition reads, and what it hands back

Nutrition is one of four modules, and it shares more with the others than a week of numbers. On Pro, your training schedule tilts your meal plan's carbs toward training days and your session minutes count toward your hydration target, though the targets themselves are set from your weigh-in trend alone, not from what you lifted. Weight trend goes back out too, sitting beside your lifts on the Pro analytics chart.

Upkeep's reach here is narrower than it sounds. Medications and appointments are not read into your targets today, so if a trend jumps for a reason that has nothing to do with food, that call is still yours to make.

Every change comes with its reason

When your carbs drop on a Monday morning, you should be able to see why without asking anyone. Every adjustment stores its own explanation: the trend it measured, the target it compared against, and what moved.

A real one reads: "Your weight fell 0.14 kg/wk vs a 0.45 kg/wk target, so we removed 150 kcal of carbs." No mystery, and nothing that reduces to "the AI thought you should eat less." Drop the same weigh-ins in tomorrow and you get the same answer: the number came from a rule you can read, not a model's mood.

If you train with a coach, they see that reason before you do. They can approve it, change it, or throw it out.