Guide › Eat

Your day target, and why it moves

How the calorie and protein target is worked out each day.

Your day target is the calories — and the protein, carbs and fat — your body is expected to use today, adjusted for your goal. It moves on purpose: a training day is weighted for the training, and it follows your body and your recent logging. You never type the number yourself.

When to use it

• You want to know what the ring on Fuel is counting down.
• The target changed in the last few days and you want the reason.
• It reads far too high or too low, and you want to check the inputs.

Step by step

1. On Fuel, look at the big ring: the calories left today, or the calories over once you are past the target.
2. Tap the ring, or tap Energy & target at the bottom of Fuel.
3. Read Why this number: one plain sentence about what you burn on a day like this and where your goal takes it. On a training day, the line also names the rest-day figure. When the target moves because the day type did, it is recorded under Coach decisions.
4. Under How today's target is set, the rows add up to Target: Resting burn + everyday movement, then Exercise (or Exercise (none today)), then Your deficit, Your surplus or Your pace (maintain). A Weekly nudge row appears once the weekly check has moved the base.
5. To change your goal, tap Change my goal. It opens Settings > Profile & goal.

Below, Where you stand compares the day eaten with the target, and Is logging adding up? compares what your logging predicts with what the scale did: days you closed count, today never does.

How the number is made

The target is worked out from plain, tested arithmetic on your phone. Each part:

• Resting burn comes from a standard formula (Mifflin-St Jeor), using your height, birth date and sex in Settings > Profile & goal and the 7-day average of your weigh-ins. A lean-mass reading replaces the formula when you have one.
• Everyday movement adds 10 percent of the resting burn: the everyday part, before any exercise.
• Exercise adds a typical session's cost: 250 kcal on a strength day, 350 on a run day, until Forma has at least 3 of your own sessions to take the middle of. A day not marked as a rest day counts that session from the start, before you log it. A day marked as a rest day adds nothing. Past 21:00, a day with no session logged counts as a rest day. Once your watch reports today's session, its figure replaces the estimate.
• Your goal moves the day by one fixed amount of calories from your average day: about 17.5 percent off to cut, nothing to hold, 12.5 percent on to eat up. On a cut with a body-fat reading, the deficit that reading gives is used instead of the percentage. The goal itself is decided from your measured body fat (see Body fat and lean mass); until you have one, you choose it in Settings > Profile & goal.
• The weekly check may move the base of the target once a week, and only with at least 10 days of weight trend and 10 days of logged food to judge. On its own it never moves the target more than 7 percent away from what it was a week ago. It never applies a change that means losing more than 1 percent of your bodyweight a week; it asks you instead. It never takes the base below your resting burn. Its changes appear under Coach decisions (History & reports, the clock button on Progress), with an Undo.
• A floor. The target never goes below your resting burn, or below the common least-to-eat guideline for the sex in your profile: 1,200 kcal a day for women, 1,500 for men. That guideline never lifts the target above what the day burns. When the floor holds the target up, Why this number says so.
• The macros. Protein is a fixed amount per kilogram of your 7-day average weight: 2.1 g per kg to cut, 1.8 to hold, 1.7 to eat up. Fat is 27.5 percent of the calories; carbs fill what is left. So only carbs and fat move between a rest day and a training day; protein does not.

A worked example

Amira is 34, weighs 62 kg, is 165 cm tall. Her goal is to hold her weight, and she trains 3 days a week.

Forma's own wording for that strength day: "Strength day: 1,702 kcal — rest days are 1,452."

The 250 extra kcal on the training day do not change the protein — it stays at 112 g. The training-day extra goes to carbs and fat.

Good to know

A past day keeps the target it had that day; today is worked out again as your weight, your day type and your watch data change. You never type a calorie number. Forma works the target out, and the goal — cut, hold, eat up — is what you change.

Related

• Weight and the 7-day average
• Body fat and lean mass
• Your week
• Troubleshooting

Something unclear or missing? Write to support@raveniq.ai and say which page.