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Vitalis
Instrument 02 · kcal/day

Daily calorie target

Estimates the energy you burn on an average day, then sets a deficit you can actually hold for months instead of a fortnight.

Status
Calibrated
Runs
In your browser
Account
Not required
Desk
Weight loss
Control rail
Awaiting press
Units
Sex at birth
Resting rate equation
Everyday activity
Effort

Desk work with a commute on foot, errands, roughly 5,000–8,000 steps. Training is counted separately, so it is not charged to you twice.

The default. Validated on the widest range of ordinary bodies and the one most clinics use.

The rail is set. Take the reading when you are ready.

No reading yet

Set the rail above, then press Calculate calories to take a reading.

Field notes · kept beside the instrument

Reading the number without letting it read you

Both sides

Calories in versus calories out

Energy balance is a ledger, not a scoreboard, and both columns move. Intake you set with a fork. Output is mostly resting metabolism, which you barely control, plus everything you do standing up, which you influence far more than you expect. Sit still for a fortnight and the same body quietly spends less.

That is why the figure above is an estimate rather than a measurement. Two people with matching stats can burn three hundred kilocalories apart. No calculator closes that gap.

Baseline

Why a daily calorie target is a starting line

Treat your target as an opening bid. Hold it fourteen days, weigh under identical conditions — same morning, same scale, before breakfast — and read the trend, never a single day.

Then adjust in small steps. A hundred kilocalories either way changes a fortnight; four hundred changes your mood and little else. Nothing here needs a clean slate on Monday, and no single meal is ever large enough to matter much.

Noise

What to do when the scale disagrees

Scales weigh everything, not just fat. Salt, stored carbohydrate, hormones and an unhurried gut can park two kilograms on you overnight and hand them back by Thursday. That is water moving, not a plan failing.

So widen the window. Compare this week average against the one four weeks ago, and check what the scale cannot see: how a waistband sits, what the tape measure says, whether your training loads are climbing. If a month of honest eating moves nothing at all, the estimate was simply wrong for you — rerun it at your current weight and carry on. Weight that shifts sharply without explanation is worth raising with a doctor rather than debugging in a spreadsheet.

Elsewhere on the bench

All tools

  • BMI & body composition

    Where the index stops being useful.

    Open instrument

  • Protein & macro split

    A protein floor that protects muscle.

    Open instrument

  • Hydration planner

    A realistic daily fluid figure.

    In calibration

  • Sleep cycle planner

    Bedtimes and a caffeine cut-off.

    In calibration