Glossary

A calorie on a food label is really a kilocalorie: the energy needed to raise one kilogram of water by one degree Celsius, and the unit every nutrition figure on this site is given in.

A food diary is a record of everything eaten over a period, kept on paper or in an app; its value comes from consistency and honesty rather than from the precision of any single entry.

A household serving is a portion expressed in the units people really use — a roti, a katori, a cup, a tablespoon — rather than in grams, so a meal can be logged without weighing anything.

A nutrition label is the panel on packaged food declaring energy and nutrient content per serving and per 100 g; regulations permit a tolerance between the declared and actual values, typically around 20 per cent.

A serving size is the quantity of food a nutrition figure refers to; it is set by the manufacturer or database rather than by how much you eat, which makes it the most common source of logging error.

Cooked weight is the weight of food after cooking, which differs from raw weight mainly through water gained or lost; it is only a valid basis for logging when the database entry is also for the cooked food.

The edible portion is the part of a food that is actually eaten after removing peel, bones, seeds and shells; composition tables state whether a value refers to the edible portion or to the food as purchased.

A food composition table is a reference database of the nutrient content of foods, produced by a national body from laboratory analysis; it is the primary source behind any trustworthy calorie figure.

IFCT, the Indian Food Composition Tables, is the reference published by India's National Institute of Nutrition giving analysed nutrient values for Indian foods, including cooked dishes and household measures.

A katori is the small bowl used across Indian households to serve dal, curry, curd and vegetables; a standard one holds roughly 150 ml, though real ones range from about 100 to 250 ml.

Raw weight is the weight of an ingredient before cooking; because cooking mainly changes water content rather than energy, raw weight is the more stable basis for calculating calories.

USDA FoodData Central is the United States Department of Agriculture's public food composition database, combining laboratory-analysed foundation foods, legacy reference values and branded product data.

A yield factor is the ratio of a food's cooked weight to its raw weight, used to convert between the two; rice sits near 2.5 to 3, meat near 0.7, and it varies with method and duration.

Amino acids are the building blocks proteins are made from; nine of the twenty used by the human body are essential, meaning they must come from food because the body cannot make them.

Carbohydrate is the macronutrient comprising sugars, starches and fibre; it supplies about 4 kcal per gram, is the body's preferred fuel for hard training, and has no strict minimum dietary requirement.

A complete protein is a food source that supplies all nine essential amino acids in proportions adequate for human needs; eggs, dairy, meat, fish and soy qualify, while most single plant sources fall short in one.

Dietary fat is the most energy-dense macronutrient at about 9 kcal per gram; it is required for hormone production and the absorption of fat-soluble vitamins, and it is the item most often missed in home-cooked food logs.

Fibre is carbohydrate that the small intestine cannot digest; it adds bulk and slows digestion, improves fullness and gut health, and yields far less energy per gram than other carbohydrate.

Leucine is the essential amino acid that acts as the main dietary trigger for muscle protein synthesis; a meal containing roughly two to three grams of it is enough to produce a full response.

A macronutrient is one of the three nutrients the body uses for energy in gram quantities — protein, carbohydrate and fat — together with alcohol, which also supplies calories but serves no nutritional purpose.

Micronutrients are the vitamins and minerals the body needs in milligram or microgram quantities; they supply no calories, so a diet can hit every macro target and still be nutritionally poor.

Protein is the macronutrient made of amino acids that the body uses to build and repair tissue, including muscle; it supplies about 4 kcal per gram and is the one macronutrient with a daily target worth tracking.

Muscle protein synthesis is the process by which the body builds new muscle protein; it rises after eating protein and after resistance training, and muscle is gained when it exceeds breakdown over time.

Whey protein is the fast-digesting protein fraction separated from milk during cheese-making, sold as a powder; it is a convenient concentrated protein source, not a requirement for building muscle.

A deload is a planned week of reduced training load or volume, taken to let accumulated fatigue clear so that performance can rise again; it is a scheduled part of training, not a break from it.

A one-rep max is the heaviest weight you can lift once with acceptable form; it can be tested directly or estimated from a set of several repetitions, and it is the standard reference for training loads.

Progressive overload is the gradual increase in training demand over time — more weight, more reps, more sets or better control — and it is the requirement that makes a training programme produce adaptation.

RIR, or reps in reserve, is the number of repetitions you could still have completed at the end of a set; it is the inverse of RPE and describes the same thing in more concrete terms.

RPE, or rating of perceived exertion, is a subjective 1–10 score for how hard a set was; in strength training a 10 means no repetitions left in reserve and an 8 means about two were.

Training volume is the total amount of work done, usually counted as hard sets per muscle group per week, and it is the training variable most closely associated with muscle growth.

BMR, or basal metabolic rate, is the energy your body spends at complete rest to keep organs, temperature and basic cell function going; it is the floor of your daily expenditure, not a calorie target.

Body recomposition is losing fat and gaining muscle at the same time, which produces a visibly different body at a nearly unchanged bodyweight and is most achievable for beginners and people returning after a layoff.

A calorie deficit is the amount by which your daily energy intake falls below your daily energy expenditure; sustained over weeks, it is the only mechanism by which stored body fat is lost.

Energy balance is the difference between the calories you take in from food and drink and the calories your body spends over the same period; a negative balance means fat loss, a positive one means gain.

Maintenance calories are the daily intake at which your weight holds steady over several weeks, measured from your own data rather than predicted by a formula.

NEAT, or non-exercise activity thermogenesis, is the energy you spend on everything that is not sleeping, eating or deliberate exercise: walking, standing, chores, fidgeting and carrying things.

Satiety is how full a food keeps you and for how long, which depends far more on its protein, fibre, water and volume than on its calorie count alone.

TDEE, or total daily energy expenditure, is the total number of calories your body spends in a day: resting metabolism, the energy cost of digesting food, deliberate exercise and all incidental movement combined.

Water weight is the short-term change in body mass caused by shifts in body water, glycogen, sodium and gut contents, which can move the scale by one to three kilograms without any change in body fat.

A weight trend is a rolling average of your daily weigh-ins, usually over seven days, which strips out water and gut-content noise and shows the direction body fat is actually moving.

A data export is a file containing everything you have logged in an app, in a format you can read elsewhere; the ability to take it with you is what stops a food log from becoming a hostage.

A food database is the set of foods and nutrition values a calorie app searches; its quality — whether entries are verified, sourced and deduplicated — matters more to logging accuracy than any feature in the app.