What should you
actually be eating?
Free, and no sign-up. A starting point in about thirty seconds: calories, macros, and the portions to hit them without weighing a thing. Pick how you eat, from vegan, keto and paleo to high protein and the rest, and the split and the foods follow. These are estimates from formulas, not a plan built around you. That part needs a conversation.
About you
Optional. Set it and each pace below shows how long it would take.
Together that reads as ×1.3 on your resting burn. The day carries more of it than the gym does; sessions matter, they are just smaller than they feel.*
›Know roughly your body fat? It sharpens the estimate (optional)
Leave this alone if you are guessing. A figure five points out moves the answer about as far as having none at all, so it is only worth setting if a description above genuinely matches.
Pick a pace
Faster is not better. It is just faster, and harder to hold. Your maintenance sits around 2,285 calories.
The safety floor is 110 percent of your resting burn. A pace held there cannot go lower, which is why two paces can share a number.
How long do you run this? A deficit is a block, not a lifestyle: 8 to 12 weeks at the pace you picked, then a week or two back at maintenance before deciding the next block. Long cuts hold better with that pause than without it. Set a goal weight above and each pace will show how long the whole job takes and roughly when it lands.
What that looks like on a plate
One target, two ways of holding it. Use your hands at the meal; the grams are there when you want to check yourself.
Just use your hands
No scale, no app, nothing to weigh. Your hand scales with you, which is exactly why it works as a measure. Foods shown are balanced.
1.5 palms of protein · 6 a day
Chicken, fish, beef, eggs, Greek yogurt
1.5 fists of vegetables · 6 a day
Anything green, plus peppers, tomatoes, mushrooms
2 cupped handfuls of carbs · 8 a day
Rice, potato, oats, pasta, bread, fruit
1 thumb of fats · 4 a day
Oil, butter, nuts, avocado, cheese
›How to hold your hand
Palm. Your palm without the fingers, and as thick as your palm, not just as wide. A thin slice the same width across is half a palm, not one.
Fist. The volume your closed fist takes up, not the area it covers on the plate. Pile vegetables up rather than spreading them out.
Cupped hand. Cup your hand and fill it level: what would stay put if you tilted it a little. A heaped hand is nearer two than one.
Thumb. Your whole thumb, tip to the base knuckle, in width as well as length. Picturing the tip alone is why fat gets under-counted.
Measure against your own hand, never against the drawing. A bigger person has a bigger hand, and that is the whole point of the method.
The same day, in grams
For anyone who wants to see the arithmetic, or who already tracks.
›How that was worked out
Protein is set from your bodyweight and held there; fat keeps a floor for hormonal health; carbs take what is left. Balanced: nothing excluded. Fat takes 30% of what is left after protein.
Getting the carbs rightWhich carbs count double, where the fibre comes from, and the one rule for meal order.›
One cupped handful is a cupped hand of cooked rice, pasta, potato or oats, about 25 g of carbohydrate.
Not every carb is one handful
- Counts as one
- Cooked rice, pasta, potato, quinoa, cooked oats
- Counts double
- Bread, wraps, dry oats, granola, dried fruit, pastry
- Counts half
- Berries, most fruit, squash, beans, lentils, plain yogurt
›Why they count differently
- Counts as one.
- Cooked, so they are mostly water. This is the handful the 25 g reference is set from.
- Counts double.
- The water has been baked or dried out, so the same handful holds roughly twice the carbohydrate. A cupped hand of granola is nearer two of rice.
- Counts half.
- Mostly water and fibre, so a handful carries about half. The cheapest place to be generous.
Juice, smoothies, sweetened coffee and alcohol count the same as food and satisfy far less. Chew your carbs where you can.
Where the fibre comes from
Your target is 25 g a day. No single food gets you there.
›Where those grams actually come from
- Vegetables.
- Roughly 2–4 g a fist, and they do not come out of the carb budget at all.
- Whole carbs.
- Beans, lentils, oats, potato with the skin, whole fruit. A handful brings a few grams of fibre with it.
- Refined carbs.
- White bread, crackers, juice, sweets. The same cost against the budget with almost none of the fibre. Wholegrain versions win some of it back.
Fibre matters more the lower the calories go. It is the part of a meal that slows it down and keeps you full afterwards. Spend the carb budget on vegetables and whole carbs first, and let bread have whatever is left.
At each meal, eat the protein and the vegetables first and the starch last. Same food, less of it needed.
None of this needs memorising. In the app, a photo of your plate is read against these rules for you, and Sean tunes your targets as your weight trend moves. See how coaching works →
Cardio, by heart rateFrom your age (35): max heart rate ≈ 184 bpm, and zone 2, where most cardio belongs, is 110–129.›
Every number here is set by the age you entered above: the heart's ceiling falls a little each year, so a 35 year old and a 60 year old train to different numbers, and this table re-draws itself if you change your age. The training days you picked earn the most when they are spent in the right zone: most cardio in zone 2, one harder session a week above it. Read your pulse from a watch or chest strap, or count ten seconds at your neck and multiply by six.
Recovery · 92–110 bpm
Barely feels like effort. Warm-ups, cool-downs, easy walks.
Base · 110–129 bpm
Where most of it belongsYou could hold a conversation the whole time. Builds the aerobic engine, and it is where most cardio should live at every age.
Tempo · 129–147 bpm
Talking drops to short sentences. Useful in doses, easy to overuse.
Threshold · 147–166 bpm
A few words at a time. Hard intervals that buy fitness and cost recovery.
Max · 166–184 bpm
Near flat out, in bursts of seconds to a couple of minutes.
* Under 40. Zone 2 builds the base, with one or two harder sessions a week on top. Recovery is cheap at this age, so the top zones are affordable.
›Where these numbers come from
A formula: 208 minus 0.7 times your age, so treat the edges as soft. The talk test in each zone is the honest check, and a max you have actually seen on a hard effort beats the arithmetic.
Or photograph a plate
Reads the meal into hand portions and tells you how it sits against the day above. It does not put a calorie number on one plate. A photo is not accurate enough for that, and a meal is not a number. Nothing is stored.
Bright, overhead light reads best. Dim photos tend to miss oils and sauces. Packaged food? Photograph the nutrition label instead and it reads the numbers straight off it.
A few questions, then your PDF
All optional, and the download works either way. Answer them and they come back in the PDF, so what you are holding is about you rather than about a formula.
What have you already tried?Pick as many as apply (optional)›
What usually gets in the way?Pick as many as apply (optional)›
A calculator only knows the four numbers you typed in. It does not know how you train, how you sleep, what injuries you are working around, or what you have already tried. Start here, stay with it for two weeks, then change it based on what the scale actually does.
Want these set properly?
In the app, your targets adapt to your weight trend every week, around how you actually eat, and I review every change before it reaches you. That is the part a formula cannot do.
See the packages