Macro Tracking for Physical Jobs: Trades, Warehouse and Care Work

TL;DR

• Occupational activity is the single biggest variable in your daily burn, and it is the one every app handles worst. Heavy manual work can add 800 to 1,200 kcal a day over a desk job.
• Physical Activity Level for sedentary work sits around 1.4 to 1.5. For heavy labour it runs 2.0 to 2.4. That gap is roughly 1,000 kcal for an 80 kg adult. See our full guide to calculating your TDEE if you want the underlying maths.
• The classic error is picking “moderately active” and then adding your gym sessions on top, or picking “sedentary” because you do not train. Both are wrong, in opposite directions, and both show up on our list of common macro tracking mistakes.
• Protein at 1.6 to 2.2 g/kg, carbs high enough to refill glycogen between shifts, and fat as the flexible remainder. Under-eating carbs is why day four of a run feels like wading through wet sand: our carb guide covers the numbers in more detail.
• Two weeks of honest logging plus weekly weigh-ins beats any calculator. Your job is not an average.

Every calorie calculator is built for office workers

Standard TDEE calculators multiply your basal metabolic rate by an activity factor. The problem is what those factors were designed to describe: they assume a mostly seated day plus a few discrete gym sessions. They were never built for someone who spends seven hours on their feet carrying things.

What the multipliers actually mean

The commonly used tiers map roughly to these Physical Activity Level values:

• Sedentary, 1.2: desk job, no structured exercise.
• Lightly active, 1.375: desk job, one to three sessions a week.
• Moderately active, 1.55: desk job, three to five sessions a week.
• Very active, 1.725: desk job, six to seven sessions, or a physically active job.
• Extra active, 1.9: physical job plus daily hard training.

Notice that four of the five tiers assume you sit down for a living. Occupational research puts sustained heavy work, construction, agriculture, loading, at a PAL of 2.0 to 2.4. For an 80 kg man with a BMR near 1,750 kcal, moving from 1.4 to 2.2 is the difference between 2,450 and 3,850 kcal. That is not a rounding error, it is a second dinner.

The two ways people get this wrong

The first is double-counting. You select “very active” because your job is hard, then log your training separately, then eat back the exercise calories your watch awards you. Now the same effort is being paid for twice and you cannot work out why the scale is drifting up.

The second is more common and more damaging. You select “sedentary” or “lightly active” because you do not go to the gym, so you do not think of yourself as active. Then you spend a week on 1,800 kcal while hauling stock, wonder why you are ravenous at 3pm, and conclude you have no willpower. You have no fuel.

What a shift actually costs

Some rough anchors from occupational and step-count data:

• Warehouse picking and packing: 15,000 to 25,000 steps a shift, frequent lifting. Often 900 to 1,400 kcal above resting.
• Nursing and care work: 10,000 to 16,000 steps, plus patient handling. Roughly 600 to 1,000 kcal.
• Construction, groundwork, scaffolding: fewer steps than warehouse work in some roles, but far more load carriage and vertical work. 800 to 1,300 kcal.
• Delivery and multi-drop driving: highly variable. Long seated blocks punctuated by carrying. Often lower than people assume, 400 to 700 kcal.

Treat those as starting brackets, not truth. Individual variation in non-exercise activity thermogenesis is large, differences of several hundred kcal a day between two people doing nominally the same job are normal. The bracket tells you where to start; the scale tells you if you were right.

Setting the macros

Protein

1.6 to 2.2 g/kg of body weight. The upper half of that range is worth it if you are also lifting, in a deficit, or over 50. Manual work is repeated low-load muscular effort, not a growth stimulus on its own, but it does add to the recovery bill. Our guide on how much protein you actually need per day has the full breakdown by goal.

For an 85 kg warehouse operative, that is 136 to 187 g a day. Spread it across whatever your shift allows rather than obsessing over perfect four-hour spacing. Two solid hits plus a shake beats one enormous evening meal. If getting there feels like a grind, see how to hit your protein goal every day for practical swaps.

Carbohydrate

This is the one people cut first and regret. Consecutive physical shifts drain muscle glycogen the same way consecutive training days do, and the deficit compounds across a run of four or five. If day one feels fine and day four feels impossible, look at carbs before you look at sleep.

Set 3 to 5 g/kg on working days, and concentrate them before and during the shift rather than saving them all for the evening. On days off you can drop toward the lower end without noticing.

Fat

Whatever is left after protein and carbs, with a floor of about 0.6 g/kg for hormonal health. Fat is calorie dense and slow to leave the stomach, which makes it useful for long gaps between breaks and awkward on days when you need to be able to move immediately after eating.

Eating it when you cannot just stop

The hard part is rarely the arithmetic. It is that 3,200 kcal is a lot of food to get down in two twenty minute windows and a drive home.

• Front-load breakfast. If you start at six and your first break is ten, a 700 to 900 kcal breakfast is not excessive, it is the only sensible place to put it.
• Build a fixed van or locker kit. Tinned fish, oatcakes, nuts, jerky, UHT milk, protein powder. Nothing that needs a fridge, all of it logged once and reused.
• Drink some of it. When chewing time is short, a 600 kcal shake with milk, oats, peanut butter and whey is the difference between hitting your target and finishing 800 short.
• Salt properly if you sweat. Hot warehouses, roofing in summer and PPE all push sodium losses up. Cramp and end-of-shift headaches are often electrolytes rather than dehydration alone.

Tracking it without a kitchen

The reason most people in physical jobs abandon tracking is friction. You are not weighing chicken at 05:40, and you are not typing entries with gloves on. If that sounds familiar, our guide to tracking macros without a food scale covers the visual and hand-measure methods that hold up on a job site.

Photograph the meal and let the app estimate it, scan the barcode on whatever came out of the meal deal, and save the four or five things you actually eat every week as repeats. Chowdown does all three for free, with no premium tier gating the scanner, which matters when the whole point is to remove obstacles rather than add a subscription.

Log for two weeks without changing anything, weigh yourself three or four mornings a week, and average. If weight is stable, your true maintenance is the average intake you just recorded, regardless of what any calculator claimed. Then adjust by 300 to 500 kcal in whichever direction you want to go. That measured number will beat every activity multiplier on the internet, because it is the only one that has actually met your job.