Every body-composition strategy references one number — maintenance calories, the intake where your weight holds steady — and most people guess it from calculators that miss by hundreds. The real number comes from two weeks of your own data. Here is the finding protocol.

Why Calculators Miss

TDEE calculators average populations — your metabolism, movement habits and fidget-factor (genuinely significant) are individual. The calculator’s number is a starting hypothesis; your scale-and-log data is the experiment that corrects it.

The Two-Week Protocol

Eat normally, log honestly (the whole two weeks — weekends confess too), weigh daily under identical conditions (morning, post-bathroom), average each week. Weight stable across the weeks: your average intake IS maintenance. Trending up or down: adjust the estimate by the trend’s math.

The Daily-Weight Truce

Daily weighing serves the AVERAGE, not the day: single readings swing wildly on water, salt and cycle timing (the two-pound overnight ‘gain’ is never fat — fat math doesn’t move that fast). Watch weekly averages; let the daily numbers be weather.

The Number’s Uses

With maintenance known: recomp eats at-or-slightly-under it with high protein, gentle fat-loss phases run 300-500 under, and — the underused option — eating AT maintenance while strength climbs is a legitimate, sustainable strategy the diet industry never advertises. The number was the map’s legend; everything else is route choice.

Two weeks of logs, daily weights averaged weekly, calculator corrected by data. Maintenance was never a mystery number — it was an experiment you run once and reference for years.