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. So I started weighing twice – once after my 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.
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?