FAQ

A nutrition and body-recomposition tracker. You log meals — by photo, plain text, barcode, or search — and Makuro learns your real energy needs to set calorie and macro targets that adapt as your body changes.

No. You can log your first meal in seconds and start tracking right away.

Makuro is free to download and start using. Any premium features will be clearly described in the app.

Makuro is in active development and coming soon to the App Store. This site is where you’ll find it first.

Makuro learns your real energy needs from your own data instead of a one-size-fits-all formula. After 2–3 weeks of logging it’s tuned to your metabolism rather than a population average.

It uses the energy-balance method: your intake and your smoothed weight trend together reveal how much you actually burn. Before you have enough data it leans on a validated formula, then shifts toward your measured numbers as clean weeks accumulate. The full method is documented and cited on our methodology page.

Because your metabolism does. Energy expenditure adapts as you lose or gain weight, and a target frozen on day one drifts wrong within weeks. Makuro tracks the change so your numbers stay right.

Yes, optionally. Turn on Import sleep (Me → Apple Health) and Makuro reads your nightly sleep from any app that writes to Apple Health — Apple Watch, Garmin, Oura, Samsung Health, and others — then shows how your sleep tracks with your appetite in the Sleep & Appetite insight.

No — deliberately. In controlled studies, short sleep raises appetite (ghrelin up, leptin down) and people eat several hundred calories more the next day, while their energy expenditure barely changes. So the honest effect of sleep is on how much you eat, not how much you burn. Makuro shows sleep against your intake as a correlation in your own data, and never uses it to adjust your measured expenditure. There is a fuller write-up, with citations, in our sleep and appetite article.

Most apps set your targets from a formula once and never revisit them. Makuro learns your actual metabolism from your data and keeps adapting — and logging is genuinely fast: photos, plain text, nutrition labels, or barcodes.

Only where they genuinely help. If you opt in, your measured activity informs the starting estimate, replacing the self-reported activity level. But wearable calorie totals carry large errors, so once your own logging takes over, Watch data never feeds the measurement. The methodology page explains why.

Snap up to five photos of your meal — extra angles or the nutrition label help — and Makuro estimates the foods and portions, returning macros you can review and edit before saving. No photo handy? Just type what you ate.

Yes — deeply. Search in your own script or in romanization, and serving sizes are the real ones: a bowl of rice is a bowl, not “100 g”. Curated data covers common Japanese products too.

Daily weigh-ins help most, because Makuro smooths out water-weight noise to find your true trend — but it works with whatever cadence you keep. More data just sharpens the picture.

Yes — Makuro follows your iPhone. Every weekly view (the diary strip, habit cards, calendars) uses the system week, so set it once in Settings → General → Language & Region → First Day of Week and Makuro matches, along with every other app on your phone. Your weekly check-in is separate: it looks at the last 7 days whenever it runs, so it works the same no matter which day your week starts.

Yes — with a dedicated calculator, because alcohol has no nutrition label but always prints its ABV, and volume × ABV computes the calories exactly (ethanol is 7 kcal per gram). Presets cover beer, chūhai, sake, shochu, soju, makgeolli, highball, wine, and more, with real serving sizes like a 中ジョッキ or one gō. Logged drinks count standard drinks per week (your country’s definition), can track against a weekly ceiling you set, and sync to Apple Health’s Alcohol Consumption metric.

English and Japanese today, with more languages planned. Food search understands native scripts and romanization either way.

Your health data is yours. Makuro is designed to keep your tracking on your device and never sells your data. Full details are in our privacy policy.

Makuro is built natively for the latest iOS, with home-screen widgets and an Apple Watch companion — glance at what’s left today and log weigh-ins right from your wrist.