About this site

This site explains how weight regulation works — energy balance, the ways of eating people try, what the measurements mean, and what the evidence does and does not show — in plain language, with a source and that source's limitation next to every number.

It is made by the people who build Modice, a small application that plans a day's food to an energy target computed from your actual day and keeps a diary that never grades you. The site is the public face of the same work: the app enforces rules deterministically, and the site shows where those rules come from. When the app can verify a way of eating as a rule, the site says so; when it cannot, the site says that too.

What we are and are not

We are not a clinic, and nobody on the team is a registered dietitian or a doctor. We do not give individual advice. What we do is read the guidelines and the trials carefully, cite them precisely, record their limitations honestly, and correct ourselves in public when we get something wrong. The editorial policy describes exactly how.

This site sells nothing but the app it belongs to, carries no advertising and no affiliate links, and takes no money from food, supplement or diet companies.

What we deliberately leave out

Weight-loss medication, very-low-calorie programmes and anything for people under eighteen belong with a doctor, and those pages will not appear here until a qualified reviewer has read them. Comparisons between people, before-and-after photographs and anything designed to make a reader feel guilty do not appear here at all.