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 days and compares that to the week before it. 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, deload, and recomp phases are supposed to hold steady, so MuscleBuddy leaves them alone rather than chasing a number that was never the point.

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 weekly steps after a long deficit. The step size comes from where you are now versus where maintenance is, and the pace responds to the scale: start climbing quickly and the next step shrinks. 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, usually lined up with hard sessions, light sessions, and rest days. 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 working with a coach, and every phase transition waits on that coach's approval before it moves.

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 the targets it sets are not calculated in isolation. Your training load and session history come in from the training module, so a week of heavy squats is not read the same way as a week of rest. Weight trend and intake go back out: training decisions and the health module's recovery picture both use them.

Upkeep matters here more than it sounds. Fasting windows, medications that move appetite or water weight, and appointments that break a routine all land on the same clock as your weigh-ins, so a trend that jumped has somewhere to be explained rather than being treated as fat gained.

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: "Weekly change (-0.30 lbs) is above target (-1.0 lbs/wk). Adjusting carbs down by ~150 kcal." 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.