TempoLife › Features › Video explainers › calorie-deficit-arithmetic

The deficit arithmetic nobody shows you

The viewer can convert a daily deficit into a weekly rate, and calibrate their expectations against arithmetic instead of advertising.

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The hook

“Half a kilo a week. Here is exactly what that costs per day.”

First four seconds. It states the surprise outright rather than promising one, because a promise is a reason to scroll and a surprise is a reason to stay.

Why this topic is worth 85 seconds

Weight loss is not a diet, it is a subtraction problem. A 500 kcal a day gap is roughly half a kilo a week — the sort of pace a body can hold onto.

The 7 700 kcal per kilogram figure is a chemistry number, not a scale number. Real bodies lose water and lean tissue alongside fat and the scale reacts to all three.

The failure mode this video wants to prevent is the aggressive deficit that produces one great week and four rebound weeks. Naming that up front is the point.

Weight-loss goals are set in kilograms per week and lived in calories per day, and almost nobody does the conversion. Doing it on screen makes both realistic targets and impossible ones obvious at a glance.

It is also the script that sets up every other one: once the viewer knows the exchange rate, the size of a snack, a walk or a skipped breakfast all become comparable.

The storyboard

Read it as a script

The voiceover column, in order, is the whole piece:

Half a kilo a week. Here is exactly what that costs per day.

A kilogram of body fat represents roughly seven and a half thousand calories. That is the exchange rate between the scale and the plate, and every target converts through it.

So half a kilogram a week is that figure halved, divided by seven. A daily deficit in the hundreds — achievable, unglamorous, and slow.

Run the same arithmetic on any advertised result. Losing several kilograms in a week would need a daily deficit larger than most people eat in a day, which is why those results are water and not fat.

And a bigger deficit is not simply faster. Past a point you lose more muscle, you get hungrier, and adherence collapses — so the theoretical rate stops being the real one.

Set the daily number, not the weekly dream.

Every number this script shows

The long division performed on camera.

Nothing in the storyboard above quotes a figure directly. The beats refer to numbers and this table supplies them, so a script written months ago cannot go stale against its own data.

Production notes

• Do the division on screen by hand. A calculator app removes the point of the video.
• Use a generic invented advertising claim, never a real brand or product.
• The adherence beat prevents this from becoming an argument for crash dieting. Keep it.

Closing card

Set a realistic deficit at tempolife.app/calculators/calorie-deficit

General information, not medical advice. These scripts describe averages across populations; nothing in them is a diagnosis or a treatment recommendation.

Source: Figures computed from the TempoLife food database (USDA FoodData Central SR Legacy) and the 2011 Compendium of Physical Activities · checked 2026-09-02

What the script points at

• Calorie deficit calculator
• Calorie deficit basics
• TDEE calculator

Other scripts

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