How Gauge sets your targets

Every number Gauge shows you comes from a deterministic engine — not an AI guessing, not a generic calculator. Here's how it thinks, so you can trust what it asks of you.

It starts with your baseline

From your stats (age, height, weight, sex), Gauge computes your resting burn, then scales it by your Daily Activity setting — how much you move when you're not training. Workouts are deliberately left out of that multiplier: your training is added on top, per session, so a rest day and a long-run day get honestly different numbers instead of one blurry average.

Macros drive, calories follow

Gauge builds your day from macros, and calories are just their sum:

• Protein is steady: higher while cutting, scaled to your weight, the same on rest days as hard days.
• Fat flexes gently with the day type.
• Carbs are the lever. They swing with your training — modest on rest days, loaded on long days — and they're what every safety rail adjusts. When a rail needs to raise your target, it hands the energy back as carbs, because carbs fuel the work.

Endurance athletes see big carb swings with session length; strength and functional athletes get a calm, steady target with a modest training-day bump. Same engine, different fueling logic — see How day targets and day types work.

Your pace, held honestly

Your Weight Goal tier (gentle / standard / max) sets a weekly pace as a share of bodyweight. The engine enforces it with guardrails, not vibes:

• No single day carries too deep a deficit — hard training days are protected most.
• The week is audited as a whole: if the days add up to more than your pace allows, the excess comes back as carbs.
• Race days, big days, and your event taper pause the deficit entirely.
• And beneath everything sits a hard calorie floor based on your resting burn. Nothing — no goal, no plateau, no adjustment — can push a target below it.

It learns from your results

Formulas are population averages; your metabolism is a sample size of one. So Gauge closes the loop: every day it compares two weeks of evidence — what it predicted your maintenance was, versus what your logged food and weight trend say it actually was — and nudges its estimate toward the truth.

• Adjustments are small and bounded: a step at a time, never more than 300 calories total in either direction.
• It works both ways. A stalled cut gets a genuinely deeper push; a stalled gain phase gets more food; loss that's too fast gets reined in.
• It demands evidence first. About ten well-logged days and a few weigh-ins in each week are required — with spotty data, Gauge holds steady rather than chasing noise. A plateau you didn't measure is missing data, and the honest response to missing data is log more, never eat less.
• It's never silent. An adjusted day says so in its rationale ("results-adjusted −150 kcal"), and your morning digest can explain it.

The practical upshot: log honestly and weigh in a few times a week, and your targets stop being a formula's opinion and become a running conversation with your actual results. Even imperfect logging works in your favor — Gauge adapts to how you actually log, so the numbers keep meaning something.

When numbers change instantly

Adaptation is gradual by design, but the engine itself recalculates immediately whenever you change an input: your weight, target mode, training style, weight-goal pace, or daily activity. Tag a training day or sync a workout and the day re-grades on the spot.