Maintenance Calorie Calculator

Maintenance calories, or TDEE (Total Daily Energy Expenditure), are the calories you can eat each day without gaining or losing weight. It is your basal metabolic rate (BMR) — the energy you burn at complete rest — plus everyday movement, exercise and the energy used to digest food. Whether you want to lose fat or gain muscle, your calorie target starts from this number.

The most widely used method is to estimate BMR with the Mifflin-St Jeor equation, then multiply it by an activity factor.

For example, a 30-year-old man who is 178 cm (5'10") and 75 kg (165 lb) has a BMR of about 1,718 kcal. At a “moderately active” level (×1.55), his maintenance is about 2,660 kcal a day.

A formula describes the average of many people, so for any one person it can be off by several hundred calories. The activity factor is the usual culprit: even lifting five times a week burns fewer calories than most people expect, so many people who train regularly are closer to “lightly active” in reality.

The most accurate method is to work backwards from what your body actually did.

Say you ate an average of 2,000 kcal a day for 4 weeks (28 days) and lost 1 kg (2.2 lb). That means you were in a deficit of about 275 kcal a day, so your maintenance is about 2,275 kcal. If this is very different from the formula, set your diet target from this number instead.

• Track for at least 2 weeks, ideally 4–8 — shorter periods are thrown off by water and glycogen swings.
• Weigh yourself several times under the same conditions (morning, after the bathroom, before eating) and look at the trend.
• Log everything you eat — missed snacks and drinks make your maintenance look lower than it is.
• 7,700 kcal is an approximation for 1 kg of body fat. Changes in muscle and water add some error.

Most people eat 10–20% below maintenance — roughly 300–500 kcal less per day. Cutting much harder raises the risk of muscle loss and rebound weight gain, so losing about 0.5–1% of your body weight per week is a sensible pace.

A lean bulk of just 5–10% above maintenance builds muscle while keeping fat gain low. A common protein recommendation is 1.6–2.2 g per kg of body weight (about 0.7–1 g per lb).

BMR (basal metabolic rate) is the minimum energy you burn lying still all day. TDEE (maintenance calories) adds daily activity, exercise and digestion on top — it is what you actually burn in a day. Base your diet on TDEE, not BMR.

When in doubt, choose one level lower. Weight training burns fewer calories than it feels like, so activity is easy to overestimate. The most accurate approach is to log your food and weight for 2–4 weeks and switch to the number you work out from that.

Yes. As your weight drops, so does your BMR — maintenance falls by roughly 12–17 kcal a day for every kg lost (about 5–8 kcal per lb). If your diet runs for a while, recalculate every few weeks.