Plain definitions of the terms on this site, in the sense this app uses them. Where a term has a number attached, the number is the one the app runs on and it links to the section of the method page that publishes it.
Two entries at the end are things SmartCrunch does not do. They are here because looking a term up and finding “we don’t have this” is a better answer than not finding it.
Basal metabolic rate#
What you burn at complete rest, keeping the lights on: heart, brain, kidneys, temperature. Predicted here by Katch-McArdle when a body-composition reading exists and by Mifflin-St Jeor otherwise (method, section 2). It is a prediction about people your size, not a measurement of you, and individual rates scatter around it by roughly a tenth either way.
Maintenance#
The daily intake at which your weight would hold steady. Basal rate plus everything you do on top of it. This is the single number every other figure in the app hangs off, and the app tries five different ways to establish it before giving up — preferring, when it can, to solve it backwards from what you actually ate and where your weight actually went.
Deficit and surplus#
The gap between what you eat and your maintenance. Negative is a deficit, positive a surplus. Converted to weight at 7700 kcal per kilogram of body mass — which is where “0.5 kg a week is about 550 kcal a day” comes from.
Budget#
Maintenance plus the delta you asked for, floored at 1200 kcal. It is the number on the ring, and the thing the whole app exists to keep honest. If your goal and pace would together ask for less than the floor, the app refuses the excess and says by how much.
Weight trend#
A 7-day trailing moving average through your weigh-ins, rather than the weigh-ins themselves. Everything that matters — the forecast date, the maintenance solver — reads the trend and never a single morning. A heavy Monday is one dot.
Coverage#
How much of a day’s total the app was actually able to compute from. Shown next to the figure as “known for 4 of 7 logged items”. Below 50% coverage the total is not shown as a number at all: it reads as unknown, because counting a missing value as zero makes a day of packaged food look spotless.
Macronutrients#
Protein, carbohydrate and fat — the three things food energy is made of. Counted at 4, 4 and 9 kcal per gram, and in this app they are an invariant rather than a display: the three always add back up to the calorie target exactly, so one screen never shows two different daily numbers.
Fibre, sugars, saturated fat, sodium#
The four figures beyond calories and macros. Three of them scale with your own budget — fibre at 14 g per 1000 kcal, sugars and saturated fat capped at a tenth of energy each — and sodium does not, at a flat 2300 mg. They arrive with products you scan or pick out of the food database. A meal typed in by hand has no such fields, and the app leaves them unknown rather than inventing them.
Open Food Facts#
The open, collaboratively edited food database the barcode scanner and the product search read from. Named here rather than described as “our database”, because it is not ours: it is a public project, its records are contributed by people, and that is why some products are missing a field. When one is, the app says so on the spot.
Adaptive maintenance#
The method this app is built around: solving maintenance backwards from your own logged weeks instead of predicting it from a formula. It is rung one of five, it has four conditions that all have to hold before it will answer, and it refuses more readily than it answers.
Net carbs — not in this app#
Total carbohydrate minus fibre and some sugar alcohols, used mostly by people eating keto. SmartCrunch counts total carbohydrate and does not compute net carbs. If you need them, a keto-specific tracker is the better tool and the comparison pages say which.
Intermittent fasting — not in this app#
Eating within a set window each day. There is no fasting window, no timer and no schedule in SmartCrunch, and the app does not claim any. Meals carry the time they were logged; nothing acts on it.
Anything here you would define differently, or a term you looked for and did not find, is worth an email — the support page has the address.