The Glossary.
Every term you keep seeing in our reviews, our recipes, and on your social feeds — defined in plain English, with the citation underneath. BMR, TDEE, GLP-1, ketosis, leptin, the "ice hack." 39 entries. Sourced. No hype.
Use this when a review mentions a "GLP-1" or a recipe references "ghrelin" and you want the one-sentence answer. Click through for the longer read.
This glossary defines 39 terms that show up everywhere in weight-loss writing — from your TDEE and BMR through GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic, the keto and Mediterranean patterns, hormones like leptin and ghrelin, and viral folklore like the "pink salt trick" and the "ice hack diet." Use it while reading our reviews, recipes, and how-to guides. Every entry is sourced to public-record references like the NIH, NIDDK, Mayo Clinic, and Harvard. None of it is medical advice.
Calorie & Metabolism
How your body burns what you eat.
Diet Types & Patterns
The named eating patterns you keep seeing on TikTok.
Drugs & Medical
Prescription weight-loss medications. Educational only — not advice.
Body Composition
What the scale doesn't tell you.
Mechanisms & Hormones
What's actually happening underneath.
Trends & Folklore
Viral 'tricks' and what's behind them — honestly.
- Apple Cider Vinegar Diet Folklore
A small but real blood-sugar effect, sold as a fat-burner. The marketing outruns the data.
- Belly Fat Tonic Folklore
A marketing category — usually a sweetened powder pitched on YouTube ads. The 'tonic' isn't the mechanism.
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The proportion of your bodyweight that's fat versus everything else (muscle, bone, organs, water).
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A metabolically active type of fat that burns calories to produce heat. Real biology. Heavily marketed.
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Eating fewer calories than you burn — the only mechanism that produces fat loss.
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Eating more calories than you burn — the mechanism behind weight gain (and muscle gain).
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An all-animal-product pattern. No vegetables, no grains, no fruit. High novelty, low evidence base.
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The chronic-stress hormone. Real link to belly fat — but not the magic-pill scapegoat marketers sell.
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A drug class that mimics a gut hormone, slowing digestion and dampening appetite.
- Ice Hack Diet Folklore
An affiliate-funnel pitch claiming icy water rewires your metabolism. The supplement is the actual product.
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How responsive your cells are to insulin. High sensitivity = good. Low sensitivity (resistance) = trouble.
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Eating only inside a fixed daily window (commonly 8 hours) — not a diet so much as a clock.
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A very-low-carb, high-fat pattern that pushes the body into ketosis. Works short-term, hard to sustain.
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Everything you weigh that isn't fat — muscle, bone, organs, water. What you protect during a diet.
- Liver Detox Folklore
Your liver does the detox. There is no published evidence that a drink, tea, or pill helps it do so better.
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A vegetable, olive-oil, fish, and legume-forward pattern with the best long-term outcome data of any diet.
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The drop in calorie burn that follows sustained dieting — real, but smaller than TikTok claims.
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The process of building new muscle tissue. Driven by protein intake and resistance training.
- Phentermine Medical
An older appetite-suppressant stimulant. Short-term use only; not a long-term weight-management drug.
- Pink Salt Trick Folklore
A viral TikTok 'recipe' of warm water, pink Himalayan salt, and lemon. Mostly water + minerals.
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Age-related muscle loss. Starts around 30, accelerates after 60. The reason resistance training matters more with age.
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The fat directly under your skin — the kind you can pinch. Less metabolically dangerous than visceral.
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The 10% or so of calories your body burns just digesting what you ate.
- Topiramate Medical
An anti-seizure drug paired with phentermine (Qsymia) for weight loss. Real effect, real side-effect profile.
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Deep belly fat packed around your organs. Metabolically active. The dangerous kind.
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An eating pattern built around low-calorie-density foods — eat volume, lose weight without hunger.
A printable plan that refuses to count almonds.
Four-week schedule. Grocery list. Swap rules. No "fat-burning loophole." No app to download. You print it, you stick it on the fridge, you eat real food.
- 4-week schedule
- Grocery PDF
- Swap rules
- No app, no fees