Macro Targets and Diet Styles

How your calories get split into protein, carbs, and fat — and how the diet styles change it.

Updated

Protein comes first

Protein is calculated before anything else, from your lean mass rather than total weight — the tissue protein actually maintains. Your baseline is the preference you picked, in grams per kilo of lean mass:

PreferenceBaseline
Standard1.3 g/kg
Balanced (default)1.6 g/kg
High2.0 g/kg
Very high2.4 g/kg

On top of that, +0.2 g/kg is added for each of three situations that raise the requirement: you're in a deficit, you're very active, and you're 40 or older. All three can stack, so a very active 45-year-old on a cut with the Balanced preference lands at 2.2 rather than 1.6.

Whatever the arithmetic produces, protein never comes out below 0.8 g per kilo of total body weight — a separate check that catches the case where lean mass is low enough to make the main formula too thin.

Fat and carbs fill the rest

After protein, your chosen diet style splits the remaining calories:

StyleFat getsCarbs get
Balanced (default)26% of calorieseverything left
Low fat21%everything left
Low carb45%everything left
Keto70%capped at 30 g, fat absorbs the rest

Keto is the odd one: it's the only style where carbs are a hard gram cap rather than a remainder.

Whatever the style, a fat floor is enforced, because chronically low fat interferes with hormonal health. It's the higher of two numbers: 20% of your calories, or a figure scaled to your height — (your height in cm − 150) × 0.5 + 30 grams. Someone 175 cm tall has a height floor of 43 g (the result is rounded); on a 1,800 kcal target the percentage floor is 40 g, so the height one wins. If your budget is too tight for the style you picked, you'll see fat set to minimum for hormonal health rather than a silently broken split.

Changing the split

Diet style and protein preference live in your plan settings — change them any time and your targets recompute. If you want full control instead, the Manual plan mode lets you type calories, protein, carbs, and fat directly (it warns you when your macros and calories disagree by a wide margin).

One thing worth knowing when the numbers look slightly "off": displayed percentages are rounded so they always total 100, and the calorie total is computed from the gram targets — a small mismatch against a hand calculation is rounding, not an error.