About
I lost 40 lbs in a year. Here’s the part that matters.
I’m Jeremy Rivera. I built this because every tool I tried asked me to count something I couldn’t see, and you’ve probably had the same problem.
Why I stopped counting
Every calorie app wants a number for the sandwich. Nobody actually knows that number. The wrapper says one thing, your body does another, and the app takes your guess and does arithmetic on it like it’s real. After a while you stop trusting the app, then you stop trusting the scale, then you just stop.
What I could see was the scale. I’d spent a year training with Tre Jacobs at Smash Martial Arts here in Cookeville, and the weekly weigh-ins were the part I struggled with. One number, once a week, and it never told me anything I could act on. It didn’t click until I started looking at my MAX weight, right after my last meal, instead of chasing the lowest number I could get on the scale. So I started weighing twice – once after that last meal, once when I woke up. The gap was the same most nights. Not identical, but close enough that after two weeks I knew my number.
What I actually did
Two meals, last one done by 2pm. Twenty minutes of something that got my heart rate up, twice a day. Weigh right after that last meal, weigh again in the morning before breakfast, write both down. That’s it. No banned foods, no macros, no spreadsheet of what I ate.
Once I knew my delta, the only thing I managed was tomorrow’s ceiling. Eat and drink until I got near it, then stop. The delta carried me down overnight. Some days I went over. I wrote it down and kept going, and that’s the whole trick: you’re not on trial, you’re taking readings.
40 lbs over about 52 weeks works out to 0.77 lb a week. That’s the number I built the app’s default around, and it happens to sit inside the 1 to 2 lb a week the CDC calls a steady pace.
Your body is not my body
That’s my result, running my own method, on me. I’m one person and this is one year. It isn’t a typical result because there is no typical result – that’s the whole point of measuring yourself instead of trusting a label. Your delta will be different from mine. The app exists to find yours.
It’s also not for everyone. If you’re under 18, pregnant, have a history of disordered eating, or manage a condition that affects fluid balance, read this first and talk to a doctor. Twice-a-day weighing and a hard cutoff are just data for most people. For some people they’re not, and I’d rather you find that out on the safety page than in week three.
Who actually got me here
Tre did. He’s the trainer and the Sensei at Smash Martial Arts, and the Two Twos came out of a year of working with him: two sessions a day hard enough to get my heart rate up, and a coach who kept asking what the scale actually said. If you’re in Cookeville and you want the version of this with a person in the room, that’s where to go.
In my own words
This is from the first episode of The Body Arcade Podcast, recorded the day the app went live. Fifty-six seconds on why the app exists.
“It flips weight tracking on its head. It looks at how much you weigh at your maximum and then your minimum. You measure twice a day and base your weight loss off of that model, as opposed to trying to guess: what number is my scale going to say this morning, and am I actually losing weight?”
“You can control your weight. You can choose how much you eat in a day, and you never weigh more than what you put in your body. It’s not magic. Calories aren’t magic. Counting calories won’t magically make you lose weight. But if you choose not to weigh more than a certain amount, by not putting more into your body, you’ll never weigh more than that amount.”
The podcast is about “getting to the bottom of what’s real and what’s just secondhand information passed on by people that want to make money off of your health journey.” I’m not exempt from that: I have something to sell too, and the app is it.
What I do the rest of the time
I’m an SEO consultant in Cookeville, Tennessee, and I host a podcast network. I spend my working life measuring things other people call unmeasurable. This is that habit pointed at my own bathroom scale.
The science page is the part I’m proudest of. Every study is there, including the ones that don’t help my case, and the claims I can’t source yet are marked pending instead of quietly stated. Know a paper I’m missing? Think one of mine says less than I’m claiming? Email me: jeremy@thebodyarcade.com. What’s your delta?