Are you not constantly in a surplus after every meal and deficit prior to meals?
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Because what matters is the surplus/deficit over a longer time span.
If you look at it hourly you would constantly go from “yeah I’m in a deficit” to “fuck, I am in a massive surplus”.
Most peoples meal cycle is one day, and they eat roughly the same amount each day. So we can extrapolate from one day to a week or a month.
If you were doing something like fasting 3 days and then eating for 4 days, you would need to count the overall calories for that 7 day period to get an accurate picture.
A day is a cycle of meals, meaning that you can target changes effectively. If each cycle has a surplus of, say, 500 calories, then you can do something about it that compounds.
A day is a convenient time unit to use because most of our activities are based around a 24 hour cycle. During the day we have peaks and valley in our intakes and expenditures of energy, so the daily numbers are sort of an average of the entire day.
And because of those peaks and valleys, measuring hourly wouldn’t make much sense. It’d difficult to say that you need X amount of calories per hour because each hour is filled filled with different activities. However, you can sort of average the entire day out and measure daily.
What matters is the long-term balance. Throughout the day you’re constantly expending energy (on daily activities or simply on keeping yourself live), and your metabolism is constantly working breaking down food and turning it into compounds your body can use to produce energy. Production and expenditure of energy is something that happens continually, not something that happens for a short time after the meal.
You could just as well measure weekly.
FYI:
The amount of calories as printed on food labels are not the amount of calories it contains, but the average amount of calories a human will extract from it by consumption.
As humans differ, the same food might mean a different actual calorie intake for different people, or even if eaten at different times by the same person.
Also: These labels are allowed to deviate +/-20% from reality.
So take the calorie labels as indications and not as absolute truths.
That is why its best to measure daily over 7 days and take the average calories consumed for the week.
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