Glossary
Terms
- Adaptive meal plan
- An adaptive meal plan is a nutrition-program concept that can be regenerated based on your logs and activity, rather than staying fixed; the target updates when you regenerate it.
- Barcode food logging
- Barcode food logging is scanning a product's barcode with a phone camera to automatically add its calorie and macro data to a meal log; the data comes from the Open Food Facts database.
- BMR (Basal Metabolic Rate)
- BMR is the energy the body spends doing nothing at all — breathing, circulating blood, holding temperature. It is the floor that every other daily calorie number is built on top of, and the largest single share of most people's expenditure.
- Body recomposition
- Body recomposition is losing fat and building muscle over the same period. Scale weight can stay almost flat for weeks while the composition underneath it changes, which is why a single weight number is a poor way to measure it.
- Calorie deficit and surplus
- A calorie deficit is eating less than your TDEE; a calorie surplus is eating more. A sustained deficit drives weight loss, a sustained surplus drives weight gain — two sides of the same energy-balance mechanism.
- Macro tracking
- Macro tracking is the practice of monitoring protein, carbohydrate and fat amounts separately, not just total calories.
- Maintenance calories
- Maintenance calories are the intake at which body weight holds steady — intake matching expenditure. It is the reference point a deficit or surplus is measured from, not a separate goal, and it moves as weight and activity move.
- Metabolic adaptation
- Metabolic adaptation is the body's tendency to lower its resting metabolic rate below what would be expected, in response to a sustained calorie deficit. It's one of the documented mechanisms behind weight plateaus.
- NEAT (Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis)
- NEAT (non-exercise activity thermogenesis) is the energy burned through movement that isn't formal exercise — walking, standing, chores, fidgeting. It's TDEE's most variable, and most overlooked, component.
- Squad
- A squad is an accountability group where members see each other's streaks side by side; there's no single shared streak — if one person's column flattens, the others see it.
- Streak
- A streak is the number of consecutive days you've opened the app — logging a meal or training isn't required, the measure is simply whether you opened the app that day.
- TDEE (Total Daily Energy Expenditure)
- TDEE is the total number of calories burned in a day through basal metabolism, daily movement and exercise.
- Yo-yo effect
- The yo-yo effect (weight cycling) is repeatedly losing weight on a highly restrictive diet, then regaining it — sometimes past the starting weight — once the diet stops. Whether it causes lasting metabolic harm is still debated.