Your body's
operating system

§1Working out what you burn

Before DYMA can set you a single target, it has to answer one question: how much fuel does this body need? It builds that up in three steps.

Table 1 — the four steps run on a real profile: male, 34, 5'10", 250 lb, on his feet most days, cutting

1. 01
   What he burns doing nothing 10(113.4) + 6.25(177.8) − 5(34) + 5 2,080 cal
2. 02
   What he burns living his life 2,080 × 1.55 3,224 cal — eat this to stay the same
3. 03
   What he eats to lose 3,224 × 0.80 2,579 cal a day
4. 04
   What that looks like on a plate 1 g protein per lb · fat at 25% of calories · carbs take the rest 245g protein · 75g fat · 231g carbs · 35g fiber

Notice his protein came out at 245 g, not the 250 g his bodyweight asks for. That's one of the limits in §4 doing its job — protein isn't allowed to eat more than its share of the calorie budget, so the plan stays possible to actually eat.

So far: DYMA knows what he should eat. Now it has to measure what he actually did.

§2Measuring what you actually spent

Your target is only half the story. The other half is what really happened today — and it arrives from three separate places.

What's a MET? Just how hard something is compared with sitting still. Sitting is 1. Walking is 3.5 — three and a half times harder. Running is 9.8. It's a scale researchers built by measuring real oxygen use across hundreds of activities, so “how many calories was that workout” stops being a guess.

Now the bit almost every app gets wrong. Look again at EQ. 7 — why subtract 2,000 steps? Because your everyday walking is already counted back in EQ. 2, inside your activity multiplier. Count those steps a second time and you've paid yourself twice for the same walk. Do that daily and you'll “earn” hundreds of calories that never existed, eat them back, and wonder why the scale won't move. DYMA strips out the overlap before a single step is credited.

Fig. 1 — the same man's day: 45 minutes lifting, 8,400 steps

That last line is the one the app grades you on. Not a step count, not a streak — the gap between what went in and what went out, updated through the day.

§3Why it can't just do this once

Here's the catch that ruins most plans. Look back at EQ. 1: your weight is an input. A smaller body burns less — so the moment you succeed, the numbers that got you there are out of date.

Table 2 — the same man, 60 lb down over a year

His target drops 337 calories a day — a whole meal — and his protein falls by 55 g. None of that is a setting anyone changed. It's the same seven equations, fed a smaller body.

Here's what it costs to ignore. At 190 lb he now burns 2,803 a day, so his real target is 2,242 — a 561-calorie deficit. Still eating his day-one 2,579? That's a deficit of just 224. The engine driving his fat loss shrank by 60% and nothing told him. He'd still believe he was cutting, while eating within 224 calories of maintenance — and he'd blame himself when the scale stopped moving.

That's the plateau almost everyone hits, and it isn't willpower — it's arithmetic. A calculator you used once still says 2,579. DYMA says 2,242, because it runs all seven equations again every time you step on the scale. That is the entire difference between a plan and a printout.

§4Rules the math won't break

Left alone, an equation will happily hand you a number no human should eat. These are the hard limits it isn't allowed to cross, whatever goal you set.

§5Sources

Nothing above is our invention. Every equation traces to one of these, and they're linked inside the app too — right next to the numbers they produce.

1. [1]Mifflin MD, St Jeor ST, Hill LA, Scott BJ, Daugherty SA, Koh YO. A new predictive equation for resting energy expenditure in healthy individuals. Am J Clin Nutr. 1990;51(2):241–247.Behind EQ. 1 — your resting burn, and every target built on it.
2. [2]Institute of Medicine. Dietary Reference Intakes for Energy, Carbohydrate, Fiber, Fat, Fatty Acids, Cholesterol, Protein, and Amino Acids. Washington, DC: National Academies Press; 2005.Behind EQ. 4 — protein, carb, fat and fiber ranges.
3. [3]Ainsworth BE, Haskell WL, Herrmann SD, et al. 2011 Compendium of Physical Activities: a second update of codes and MET values. Med Sci Sports Exerc. 2011;43(8):1575–1581.Behind EQ. 6 — the intensity score for every exercise you log.
4. [4]U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans, 2nd edition. Washington, DC; 2018.Behind EQ. 2 and EQ. 5 — activity multipliers and movement guidance.
5. [5]Institute of Medicine. Dietary Reference Intakes for Water, Potassium, Sodium, Chloride, and Sulfate. Washington, DC: National Academies Press; 2005.Behind your daily hydration target.

DYMA gives general fitness guidance, not medical advice, and is not a medical device. Talk to a healthcare professional before making major changes to your diet or exercise.