Glossary

A plain-English glossary of wellness, nutrition and AI terms.

Definitions worth bookmarking. Written for people who want to actually understand what an app or article is talking about — not the marketing version.

AI Wellness App: A wellness or nutrition mobile app that uses machine learning to remove manual steps — typically food recognition from photos, personalised meal planning, adaptive hydration goals or recipe generation from a tracked pantry.
Vision AI (Food Recognition): A computer-vision model that identifies dishes and ingredients from a photograph and estimates calories, protein, carbs and fats from the image. Replaces typing-based food logging.
Calorie Deficit: A state in which you consume fewer calories than you expend over a sustained period. The fundamental requirement for fat loss, regardless of which diet style is used to create it.
Calorie Surplus: A state in which you consume more calories than you expend. Required for muscle gain, alongside resistance training and adequate protein intake.
Macronutrients (Macros): The three energy-providing nutrients: protein, carbohydrates and fat. Tracked in grams. Most body-composition goals are reached by hitting protein and total calories first.
Mifflin-St Jeor Equation: A widely used formula for estimating basal metabolic rate (BMR) from age, weight, height and sex. The starting point most calorie calculators (including Enerium) use before adjusting for activity.
TDEE (Total Daily Energy Expenditure): The total number of calories a person burns in a day — basal metabolic rate plus the energy used for activity, digestion and exercise. Calorie targets are usually set as a percentage of TDEE.
Pantry-Aware Meal Planning: Meal-plan generation that starts from the food already in your kitchen rather than a generic shopping list. Reduces food waste and makes weekly plans easier to follow.
Adaptive Hydration: A water-intake goal that changes day to day based on body weight, activity, climate and prior intake — instead of a fixed “eight glasses a day” rule.
Intermittent Fasting (IF): An eating pattern that alternates fasting and eating windows. Common formats include 16:8 (16 hours fasting), 18:6 and OMAD (one meal a day). Effective for some people, indistinguishable from regular calorie management for others.
Apple Health / HealthKit: Apple’s system-wide health data store on iOS. Wellness apps such as Enerium read and write data here to keep nutrition, hydration, weight and workouts consistent across apps.
Google Fit: Google’s equivalent fitness data layer for Android and Wear OS, used to share steps, workouts and active minutes between apps.
NEAT (Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis): The calories you burn through everyday movement that is not formal exercise — walking, fidgeting, standing. Often a larger contributor to TDEE than gym sessions.
Recomp (Body Recomposition): Simultaneously losing fat and gaining muscle, typically at a small calorie deficit or near maintenance with high protein and consistent training. Slower than dedicated cuts or bulks but sustainable for many.
Glycemic Index (GI): A 0–100 ranking of how quickly a carbohydrate raises blood glucose compared to pure glucose. Useful at the margins, but less actionable than total carbohydrate and meal composition.
Aggregate Rating: The average user rating of an app on a marketplace such as the App Store. Used as a quality signal by both users and search engines (via the AggregateRating schema).