Most diets do not fail during the diet. They fail in the fortnight afterwards, when a finished cut turns into no plan at all. Reverse dieting is simply having a plan for that fortnight — and it is less magical and more useful than its reputation suggests.
Testing a true one rep max is risky, fatiguing, and costs you a week of training. Estimating it from a set you were going to do anyway costs nothing — provided you understand where the estimate goes wrong.
Every method of measuring body fat is wrong. The useful question is not which one is right — it is which one is wrong in a consistent direction, because a consistent error still tracks change perfectly.
Your BMR equation is accurate within about 10 percent. Then you multiply it by a number you chose from a dropdown based on a vibe. That single choice can swing your calorie target by 700 calories a day.
Your gym session burns 300 calories. The rest of your day can swing by two thousand. NEAT is the biggest and least-managed component of your energy expenditure, and it quietly collapses the moment you start dieting.
BMI is not a bad measurement. It is a good measurement being asked the wrong question — it was built to describe populations, and it gets used to judge individuals.
The right answer is not in pounds — it is a percentage of your bodyweight, which is why "two pounds a week" is sensible advice for one person and a muscle-wasting mistake for another.
The decision is less about what you want and more about where you are starting from. Two numbers — your body fat percentage and your training age — make the choice for you, and getting it wrong costs you six months.
Your watch says you burned 620 calories. Stanford researchers who validated seven wrist-worn devices found that none of them estimated energy expenditure within an acceptable error range — even while measuring heart rate almost perfectly. Here is what is going wrong, and what to do about it.
Almost every protein recommendation you have read is technically correct and practically useless, because it answers a different question than the one you are asking. The RDA prevents deficiency. You want body composition. Those are two different numbers.