Talk is cheap, so here is the real thing. The first three work from day one, before you have logged anything. The fourth needs a couple weeks of data behind it. Copy them, paste them into whichever assistant you use, fill in your own details. No signup, no email, no catch.
1. Work out your daily calorie target
Two methods in one prompt, then compared against each other. Most calculators run one and hand you a number. The gap between the two is information, and no calculator site will show it to you.
Calculate my daily calorie target. Run both methods below, then compare them.
MY DETAILS
- Age, sex, height, current weight: [FILL IN]
- Goal weight: [FILL IN]
METHOD 1: ACTIVITY MULTIPLIER
- Days per week I train: [FILL IN]
- Typical session length and type: [FILL IN]
- My job and daily movement: [DESK JOB / ON MY FEET / PHYSICAL LABOR]
Calculate my BMR using Mifflin-St Jeor. Apply the activity multiplier you judge most appropriate. Tell me which one you chose and why you chose it over the neighbouring options.
METHOD 2: MEASURED EXERCISE BURN
- What my tracker reports for a typical training week: [PASTE WEEKLY CALORIE BURN]
- Which device or app: [APPLE WATCH / PELOTON / TONAL / GARMIN / WHOOP / OTHER]
Calculate my BMR using Mifflin-St Jeor. Multiply by 1.2 only, for baseline daily living with no exercise included. Then take my reported weekly exercise burn, cut it by 50 percent, divide by 7, and add that to my daily baseline.
Do not apply a multiplier above 1.2 anywhere in this method. Anything higher counts my exercise twice, once inside the multiplier and again in the tracker number. Confirm back to me that you did this correctly.
Explain the 50 percent reduction. I want both reasons behind it, not just the arithmetic.
THEN DO THIS
1. Show both numbers side by side.
2. Tell me the size of the gap between them and what most likely explains it.
3. Give me a working range rather than a single false-precision number.
4. Take the lower end of that range, subtract a deficit you consider sustainable for someone my size, and give me a daily calorie target plus the weekly rate it implies.
5. Give me a daily protein target and show that calculation too.
6. Tell me what date to revisit this and what data I should have collected by then.
Show every calculation. Do not skip to the answer.
If anything I gave you is missing or looks wrong, ask me before calculating rather than assuming.
Why the 50 percent cut
Your tracker overestimates. Stanford tested seven wrist wearables against lab-grade measurement. Not one estimated calorie burn acceptably. The most accurate device was off by an average of 27 percent, the worst by 93 percent, and the error runs toward overestimating.
It reports gross, not net. A session showing 500 calories includes the calories you would have burned anyway sitting still. Only the amount above your baseline is genuinely extra, and your baseline is already counted.
Being wrong is not symmetrical. Cut too much and you lose slightly faster than predicted. Cut too little and you eat your entire deficit back and cannot work out why nothing is moving.
Source: Shcherbina et al., Accuracy in Wrist-Worn, Sensor-Based Measurements of Heart Rate and Energy Expenditure in a Diverse Cohort, Journal of Personalized Medicine, 2017. Fifty percent is a deliberate underestimate, not a measured correction.
2. Fact-check a nutrition claim
Most nutrition advice you encounter is a headline about a study, not the study. This walks a claim back to the primary research and tells you where the overreach happened.
Pressure-test this claim before I act on it.
Claim: [PASTE THE CLAIM]
Where I saw it: [SOURCE, IF KNOWN]
Do this, in order:
1. Explain in one paragraph what would have to be mechanistically true for this claim to hold.
2. Find the primary research it traces back to. Give me the study, authors, journal, and year. Not a news article about a study.
3. Tell me what that study actually measured: sample size, population, duration, whether it was in humans, and whether the effect size was meaningful or merely statistically significant.
4. Name the gap between what the study found and what the claim asserts. Be specific about the overreach.
5. Tell me whether the finding has been replicated, contradicted, or retracted.
6. Give a verdict: supported, partially supported, overstated, or unsupported.
If you cannot find the primary source, say so directly.
Do not fill the gap with a plausible-sounding citation. I would rather read "I could not verify this" than a reference that does not exist.
3. The scale went up and you did everything right
This is where most people quit. The scale jumps, you did nothing wrong, and the instinct is to slash calories or add cardio in a panic. This runs the arithmetic on whether that gain could physically be fat, names the likeliest cause, and tells you what to change and what to leave alone. Works whether or not you have logged data yet.
The scale went up and I do not understand why. Help me work out what
actually happened before I do something rash.
WHAT HAPPENED
- What the scale did, over what period: [UP 1.5 LB OVERNIGHT / UP 2 LB THIS WEEK]
- How long I have been in a deficit: [FILL IN]
- My current weight: [FILL IN]
PICK ONE OF THE TWO BELOW
[IF YOU HAVE LOGGED DATA]
- Daily calorie intake, last 14 to 21 days: [PASTE]
- Daily morning weigh-ins, same period: [PASTE]
- Daily protein in grams: [PASTE][IF YOU DO NOT HAVE LOGGED DATA YET]
Describe the last few days in plain language. Precision does not matter here.
- Roughly what I ate the last 3 days: [DESCRIBE]
- Anything heavier in carbs than usual: [DESCRIBE / NONE]
- Anything saltier than usual: [DESCRIBE / NONE]
- Alcohol: [DESCRIBE / NONE]
- How I weigh myself: [SAME TIME DAILY? AFTER THE BATHROOM? CLOTHED?]
ANYTHING THAT APPLIES
Started creatine recently, new or harder training, poor sleep, high stress,
travel, illness, constipation, menstrual cycle, medication change.
[LIST WHAT APPLIES / NONE]
THEN DO THIS, IN ORDER
1. Run the arithmetic first, before anything else. Tell me how many surplus
calories it would take to gain that much actual body fat, using roughly
3,500 calories per pound. Then tell me plainly whether what I ate could
physically have produced it.
2. Rank the likely explanations by how well my information supports each one.
Do not present them as equally likely.
3. Explain the mechanism behind the most likely cause. I want to understand
why it happened, not be told it is normal.
4. Tell me whether a fluctuation this size is expected at my bodyweight.
5. Tell me what to change, and what to leave alone. If the answer is change
nothing, say that.
6. Tell me exactly what to watch, and for how many days, before I conclude
anything.
Be direct. If my information suggests I am eating more than I think rather
than holding water, say so plainly. I would rather hear that than be
reassured.
Do not tell me to trust the process without showing me the numbers that
justify it.
4. Replace the estimate with your real number
Every method above is a prediction about an average person your size. After a few weeks of logging, your own data beats any formula. This one back-calculates your true maintenance from what you actually ate and what the scale actually did, then tells you how far off the estimate was. Mine was off by 432 calories a day. It needs real data to run, which is why it was not the first one on this page. Full story here.
I want to calculate my actual daily energy expenditure from real logged data instead of a formula estimate.
My data:
- Daily calorie intake, last 14+ days: [PASTE YOUR DAILY NUMBERS]
- Daily morning weigh-ins, same period: [PASTE YOUR DAILY WEIGHTS]
- Age, sex, height, current weight: [FILL IN]
Do this, in order:
1. Average my daily intake across the full period.
2. Calculate my weight trend using a 7-day rolling average at the start and end, not single-day values, so daily fluctuation does not distort the result.
3. Convert my weight change into a daily surplus or deficit using 3,500 calories per pound. State clearly that this conversion is an approximation.
4. Add or subtract that daily figure from my average intake to estimate my real maintenance calories.
5. Compare that number to what Mifflin-St Jeor predicts for me. Tell me the size and direction of the gap.
6. Tell me how much confidence my sample size supports, and what would make this estimate more reliable.
Show every calculation. Do not round until the final number.
If my data is too short, too inconsistent, or too noisy to support a conclusion, say that instead of giving me a number.
5. Adjust the plan for travel, illness, and life
A four-day trip, a stomach bug, a week of poor sleep. Each one changes what your logged data means and what to do about it. This walks through how to adjust your target and read the scale honestly when your routine breaks, rather than pretending nothing happened or scrapping the whole plan.
In the library
Those four get you started, including the real-maintenance calculation once you have the data for it. The library is the phase-two toolkit for people who stick with this: meal planning, training adjustments, travel and illness weeks, and the fact-checking workflow I run before publishing anything. Join the waitlist.
The Playbook
The system that produced all of this
$10
Every principle, every tracking method, every decision across 93 pounds. Instant download, one-time payment.
