Turn a week of food logs into your real deficit
Your food log says one deficit and the scale says another. Here is the simple maths to turn seven days of food logs into your real deficit, and read the honest gap between the two numbers.
You logged food all seven days. Burnie says you ran a 500 kcal deficit each day. You expect the scale to drop fast. Then Sunday comes, and the weight barely moved. Two numbers disagree. One of them is lying. This read shows you how to find the honest one, using your own week of food logs.
Your week has two ways to find the deficit
Your body runs one maths sum. Energy out minus energy in equals fat lost. You can solve it from two sides. From the food side, you take your average intake and subtract your daily burn. Your daily burn is your BMR plus active calories. From the scale side, you take your weekly weight change and multiply by about 7,700. Old research says about 7,700 kcal sits in one kilo of your body weight. The same paper calls this rule rough, not perfect. Real bodies do not divide this neatly. But for a weekly check, it is close enough.
Paper deficit vs scale deficit
If your food log shows a 500 kcal deficit, that is what you really ran.
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Food logs miss things. A spoon of ghee here. A sweet chai there. The oil in the sabzi. A famous study looked at obese adults who could not lose weight. They underreported their food by about 47 percent. That is like hiding almost half your plate from your own notebook. They also overestimated their activity by about 51 percent. Water hides the scale too. In healthy people, total body water can swing up to 5 percent in a day. So one week of scale change is noisy. This is why the two numbers rarely match. The gap is normal. The gap is the lesson.
The weekly honesty check in four steps
The bottom line
Your food log is a plan. Your scale is a result. Run both maths each week. The gap between them is the leak, the bites, oil and chais your log forgot. A famous study found people hid almost half their food from their own notebook, without meaning to. So trust the scale a little more than the log. Burnie is FREE, so run this check every Sunday. It costs you nothing, and it tells you the truth your week is hiding.