Feeling like you understand something and actually understanding it are two very different things.
Let's take something as simple as "calorie deficit."
Being at a calorie deficit itself requires knowing two things:
1. How much you burn in a day (total daily energy expenditure or TDEE)
2. How much your intake is for the day
Deficit = TDEE - Intake
You can do calorie counting for #2. But what can you do for #1?
The average guy does not know how to calculate these properly, let alone judge weight movement, which can move a lot in the opposite direction due to water weight fluctuations that can exceed 1 kg+ of movement a day.
If you calculate your maintenance calories using a TDEE calculator and get 3,000 kcal, then apply a 400 kcal deficit, your target intake becomes 2,600 kcal/day.
But what if your actual maintenance drops by 300 kcal the following week?
Your effective deficit is now just 100 kcal/day, assuming your intake stays the same.
Eventually you might find yourself barely losing weight, or not seeing any noticeable change for a while. You'll start wondering, "I'm eating in a deficit, so why am I not losing weight? Is there something genetically wrong with me?"
You might even blame your metabolism.
The problem is that your original calorie target was based on a static estimate of maintenance, not a continuously updated one. Your energy expenditure changes as your body weight, activity, and other factors change. A TDEE calculator can't account for those changes in real time.
The average guy does not understand expenditure, weight movement, the calorie-to-fat equation, water-weight fluctuations, and many other gotchas, and no, 20 minutes may not be enough to understand all this for an average Joe.
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