I’ve tried two of these apps recently: Fuelin and The Athletes Food Coach, with the aim to lose a couple of kgs and improve body composition whilst fueling properly for my training.
Both of these apps take your training plan and your completed rides and create bespoke macro and calorie goals based on your nutrition goals. Sounds like a great idea, a nutritional version of TR, but I found neither work well in reality.
Fuelin is particularly awful and I would encourage anyone to avoid it. The targets it sets you if you tell it you want to lose some weight are bordering on disordered eating. The way it calculates nutritional needs is bizarrely stupid; a 1hr 29 minute ride requires no additional nutrition yet a 1hr 30 minute requires 50gs of carbs and an additional 400 kcals to the day. Amazing what an extra minute can do! When I complained the co-founder was very defensive and said I wasn’t willing to follow the plan
The Athletes Food Coach is better but what both apps fail to do is to to see the big picture and to see beyond a single day. Yes, I may only be doing a easy hour today but I have some big efforts tomorrow, so macros should be adjusted accordingly. They also fail to take into account that you might have a life outside of cycling and that I’m not either sitting on the sofa or riding, I have a job and family too!
Are there any genuinely good apps out there to help with fueling and improving body composition?
Can we all appreciate how horrendous the Fuelin app is. Genuinely awful. Could do a balls out session and it’s still getting registered as z2. No difference in calories or carbs between zone 1 or z2 nor between z3/4/5. May as well just have 2. Either 35g/hr recommended or 90g/hr. Nothing else.
Recommendations are extremely low for maintenance calories even “gain” has me eating barely enough.
Terrible.
I think Fuelin is actually irresponsible and potentially dangerous in it’s recommendations. I’m trying to lose a couple of kg but it’s strategy to do that was so unessecarily aggressive and unsustainable.
On a day with a threshold workout it suggested I only consume 150g carbs (yes, for the whole day!) and 180g of protein.
When I took these issues to them they were super defensive and acted like I just wasn’t trying hard enough. Seems pretty toxic to me.
Thank you for the mention of Hexis, this is exactly what I’ve been looking for! I’ve felt the same as @CamSam through testing the other two and being disappointed, but so far not so much on Hexis.
You’re probably right. In the past it’s not something I really worried about, I used to fuel my rides, eat healthy and I stayed lean without really thinking about it!
I turned 33 last year and it’s like ever since that point my metabolism has just turned off and it’s suddenly really hard to keep weight off whilst still fueling properly! I just think I need some help to re-evaluate my nutritional needs.
Yeah, I was going to recommend MacroFactor myself. I’m down about 20 pounds from this time last year. It’s nice and simple, and the fact that it only looks at calories in vs. weight trends makes it so much more effective. There’s no gaming the system by looking at the calories you burned, comparing it to how much you’ve eaten, then grossly overestimating the number of calories you actually burn in a day.
It adjusts recommended calories on a weekly check-in, and it works out remarkably well.
I have been using MF too, I like that it doesn’t give you bonus calories for most* exercise. However what do you do for big ride days? Do you just disregard the calorie target, thinking 2+ hour ride days. Maybe I just need to ignore or manually adjust the target, maybe it just a mental thing, but I will be +1000 calories on those days.
It kinda depends on where I am in my base/build/etc. cycle. Over the spring/summer when I’m doing big outdoor rides Saturday and Sunday, I’ll just ignore MF completely one or both days and eat until I’m full (while hopefully avoiding gorging myself), then let thing sort themselves out from there. I changed my check-in day to Wednesday because that gives my system enough time to get back to normal. Mondays after a weekend of 2.5-4 hour or more rides, I frequently have a weight spike from water retention and such, but everything typically settles down by Wednesday.
Off-season when I’m mostly riding indoors, I’ll keep as close as I reasonably can to the recommended calorie limit. It’s pretty good at adjusting to off-periods and even when I’m a little wobbly, it doesn’t feel like it’s shaming me for a lack of compliance or anything.
I have a similar experience with Fuelin, I’ve been using it the past 7-8 weeks. I’m primarily an ultra/trail runner and find that a lot of the big workouts have dangerously low recommendations. For example - this past weekend I ran 7 hours (~50km, 2,800m vert), burning 4,200 calories. My daily recommendation was 4,695 calories and intra workout target was 30g CHO, 10g fat, 5g protein per hour.
I have a similar back to back big run this weekend and it is recommending the same 4,700 calories on Saturday, and less than 4,000 on Sunday! Nonsense.
I also found that if I completed an unplanned workout (for example a recovery spin on the trainer or strength workout), the calorie target for the day would actually decrease a bit. I reached out to them to try and let them know about this issue, but it never seemed to be their fault. I truly wanted to help them work out the bugs.
I’ve emailed about a refund but doubt they will honor the prior 90 day policy. I’ve switched over to Hexis and will give it a try. Initial impressions are positive - for the same workouts this weekend it is suggesting ~5,700 - 5,800 calories and heavier on the carbs during the workout.
What you called “bonus calories” is my biggest learning from using Hexis, actually. It takes my planned workouts into account prior to me preparing meals. Its calorie suggestions were sometimes challenging in my case without resorting to “extra sugar” (like in fruits, maple syrup) for lunch or “extra fat” (like nut butter) for breakfast. But the result was tremendous: I was underfueling in the run up to my workouts prior to following Hexis guidance, and my workout performance as well as satiety over the day improved considerably following its guidance. In general, big workouts mean for me that I have to eat more than I am hungry for.
Another vote for Hexis here. I’ve been using it for the last four weeks in training for my first ultramarathon, and it has been a game changer for me. Runs are feeling much better and being able to plan the runs and typical effort of said run in advance, it’s kept me fuelled ready and also shows the g/hr of carbs I will likely need. My runs have never felt so good!
Thanks, I like the concept, I will check it out, I don’t want to have to pay for two apps at the same time, when my renewal is up I will give it a try.
What is hexis typically recommending for you on your runs? For me it is carbs only, even on my long endurance runs. Fuelin was suggesting a mixture of carbs/fats/protein. In long ultras I tend to work in “real” food, so I practice that in training.
