Every week, we send out one short Daily Chase essay built off an idea we’ve explored in our most recent episode — a single thought or idea worth starting your day with.
If you’d like to read more, you can find them here.
Most calorie calculators ask for your height, your weight, your age, your activity level, and your goal. Then they hand you a number like it’s a verdict.
The problem is the number is often wrong — and the harder you train, the more wrong it gets. Calculators are built on averages, and averages don’t know you.
Our friend EC Synkowski is six feet tall, but the calculators she once used were built off average women’s data. No matter what she typed in, the number came back too low to fuel someone her size training the way she was. (A lesson, of course, she had to learn the hard way.)
So she stopped trusting the calculator and started trusting her own data. Now, that’s what she coaches her clients to do: For ten to fourteen days, track exactly what you eat — no changes, no judgment — and start from there.
The number you get will tell you whether you’re in a deficit, at maintenance, or in a surplus.
Yes, it’s slower than typing a few things into an app. It’s also the only number that’s actually built for you.
Most people aren’t failing to stick to a caloric deficit because they lack discipline. They’re failing because they adopted a stranger’s estimate of their needs instead of taking the time to measure themselves in real time and real life.
Be willing to go slow so you can go fast.
