Preferences, then About you. Five details sit here, and together they produce an estimate of what your body uses in a day. You never have to fill them in, because you can type your own calorie goal instead. If you want the app to suggest one, this is where it gets the raw material.
What each detail is for
- Sex. Used only to pick the right metabolic rate equation, and shown nowhere else in the app. It is not a profile field and nothing else reads it.
- Date of birth. Stored as a date rather than an age, so your age updates on its own and the estimate does not quietly drift out. Anything from 16 to 120 years ago is accepted, and resting metabolism falls slowly with age.
- Height. In centimetres or feet and inches, between 50 and 275 cm. Switching units never changes your height. It is stored once and converted for display.
- Current weight. Not typed here. It comes from your weight log, and the screen names the date it came from. To change it, log a new weight.
- Activity level. This scales the estimate, and it moves the number more than anything else on the list.
Choosing an activity level
Pick by how often you actually train, not by how busy your week feels. Each step up is worth a few hundred calories a day, so the level you choose changes the target noticeably.
- Sedentary: desk job, little or no deliberate exercise.
- Lightly active: light exercise 1 to 3 days a week.
- Moderately active: moderate exercise 3 to 5 days a week.
- Very active: hard exercise 6 to 7 days a week.
- Extremely active: a physical job, or training twice a day.
A busy week at a desk is still sedentary. Describe an ordinary month, not your best week in it.
Reading the estimate
Once the details are in, the estimate appears below them and moves as you change anything above. It shows three things:
- Resting rate (BMR): what your body uses lying still all day.
- Maintenance (TDEE): resting rate scaled by your activity level. Eat this and your weight should hold.
- Goal adjustment: what is added or taken off for losing, maintaining or gaining, at the rate you chose.
Suggested macros are offered alongside it. Use these goals fills the calorie and macro fields in one tap, and you can still edit every one of them afterwards.
How close the estimate gets
The app says so plainly: a Harris-Benedict estimate, usually within about 10% of what you actually need. For someone maintaining 2,500 kcal that is a margin of 250 kcal, which is enough to matter.
Treat it as a starting point and let reality correct it. Eat to the number for two or three weeks, watch what your weight trend does, and adjust. Your own trend line tells you more about your metabolism than any equation, because it is measuring you rather than the average of a study population.
If the estimate will not appear
It needs all five details. When something is missing, the screen names it rather than showing a figure built on gaps. For example: "Add your height and activity level to see an estimate". If it asks for a current weight, log one, because the estimate cannot run without a starting weight.