Guides
Answers, without the course.
What a calorie budget is, where a maintenance figure comes from, why the scale moves the way it does, and what a food label leaves out. Every number here says where it came from.
- How many calories should I eat to lose weight?
The ten-second number is an average of people shaped like you. Your own logged weeks give a better one — and this explains how, and when not to trust either.
- How often should you weigh yourself?
Daily weighing gives the best signal and the worst individual readings. The fix is arithmetic, not willpower: read the average, never the morning.
- How to read a food label
The two mistakes that matter are reading a per-100 g figure as a portion, and reading a missing field as a zero. Everything else on a label is arithmetic.
- How much saturated fat per day?
About a tenth of your calories, which is roughly 22 g on a 2000 kcal day. The figure moves with your budget, which is why a fixed gram target misleads.
- Maintenance calories, explained
Maintenance is the intake at which your weight holds. Every calculator predicts it from a population; your own logged weeks can measure it instead.
- How much fibre per day?
About 28 g on a 2000 kcal day, and 30 g on 2200. Tied to energy rather than fixed, because the same grams mean different things at different intakes.
- What is TDEE, and why do calculators disagree?
TDEE is maintenance under another name. The disagreement between calculators is almost entirely the activity multiplier, and it is the part no form can know.
- Why does my weight fluctuate so much?
Almost all short-term movement is water and gut contents. A kilo of fat takes 7700 kcal to build, which is why the scale can move faster than your body possibly could.
- Is 1200 calories a day enough?
1200 is a floor, not a target. It exists because below it, protein and micronutrients stop fitting on the plate — and for many people it is already too low.
- How to count calories without it taking over your life
Weigh things, log before you eat, accept that you are under-recording. Precision on the parts that matter beats precision everywhere.
- How to count calories in homemade food
Log the raw ingredients, weigh the finished dish, then log your serving as a fraction of that weight. Everything else is a variation on it.
- How to track macros
Set protein first, let fat and carbohydrate fill the rest, and check that the three add back up to your budget. Everything else is preference.
- Does Apple Health count calories, and can you trust the number?
Health stores two separate energy figures and only one of them exists without a Watch. Knowing which is which explains most of the confusion.
- Why a nutrition app should say “I don’t know”
Counting a missing value as zero makes a day of packaged food look cleaner the less you know about it. The fix is to report how much of the day the number covers.