What you actually burn
Your maintenance calories are computed from the relationship between what you logged and what the scale did over weeks. It is measurement, not prediction, and it is the number every target downstream is built on.
Log and scale, reconciled
If you logged 2,000 a day and your weight held steady, your maintenance is around 2,000 — whatever a formula says about your height. Over enough days that relationship is far more informative than any equation.
When the numbers are impossible
Sometimes the reconciliation implies an expenditure below your resting metabolic rate, which is not physically possible. The correct conclusion then is that the log is short, not that your metabolism is broken — and the app says that plainly instead of quietly lowering your target.
This is the failure mode that makes people believe they cannot lose weight on 1,400 calories. Naming it is more useful than accommodating it.
It refuses when it cannot know
Too few complete days, too few weigh-ins, or too much noise, and the app declines to state a figure. A refusal is a real result and is presented as one.
Questions
- How often does it update?
- Continuously as new complete days and weigh-ins arrive, with enough smoothing that a single big meal or a salty dinner does not move it.
- Does exercise get added on top?
- No. Measured maintenance already contains however much you move, which is why it does not need an activity multiplier guessed at signup.
Try it
CalFitness is free to start. What you actually burn is in the app from the day you install it.
Related features
- Your daily calorie targetA number derived from your own data, not a formula applied once at signup.
- Weight trendThe line through the noise, not the number on the scale this morning.
- Was that a light day or a short log?One tap that stops a half-logged day from poisoning your averages.
- Weekly energy budgetThe daily number is a slice of a weekly one, shaped around your real week.