What Is My Calorie Maintenance and How Do I Calculate It?

Think of your calorie maintenance as your body's break-even point. It's the sweet spot where the calories you eat equal the calories you burn throughout the day.

How to Calculate Your Maintenance Calories

The most accurate way starts with your Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR)—that's how many calories your body burns just keeping you alive. Then you multiply by an activity factor based on how active you are.

Here's what I recommend: Use the Mifflin-St Jeor equation for BMR, then multiply by 1.2 (sedentary), 1.375 (lightly active), 1.55 (moderately active), or 1.725 (very active). A 30-year-old woman who's 5'6" and 140 pounds with moderate activity would have a maintenance of roughly 2,100 calories.

Why This Number Matters

Once you know your maintenance, you can create a diet plan for calorie deficit by eating 300-500 calories below this number. That's how sustainable weight loss happens—not through extreme restrictions like a 1200 calorie eating plan that leaves you hungry and cranky.

Your maintenance also helps you distribute calories throughout the day. Many people ask how many calories should be in breakfast, and I typically suggest 25-30% of your total daily intake.

A Worked Example, Step by Step

Let's calculate maintenance for a 35-year-old man who is 5'10" and 180 pounds with a desk job and three gym sessions a week. Using Mifflin-St Jeor: BMR = (10 x 82 kg) + (6.25 x 178 cm) − (5 x 35) + 5, which comes to about 1,762 calories. Multiply by a "moderately active" factor of 1.55 and his maintenance lands near 2,730 calories a day. To lose weight steadily he would eat roughly 2,230-2,430—a 300-500 calorie deficit—not a crash diet.

BMR, TDEE, and Where People Go Wrong

Your BMR is what you burn at complete rest. Your maintenance—often called TDEE, or Total Daily Energy Expenditure—is BMR plus everything else: walking, fidgeting, digestion, and exercise. The single biggest mistake is overestimating activity level. Most people who train a few times a week are lightly-to-moderately active, not "very active." When in doubt, choose the lower multiplier and adjust from real-world results.

Recalculate as You Lose Weight

Maintenance is not fixed. As you drop pounds, a smaller body burns fewer calories, so a deficit that once worked eventually stalls. Recheck the math every 10-15 pounds, or whenever weight loss flattens for two to three weeks. Our free calorie calculator does this in seconds, and the personalized quiz builds the deficit into a full daily menu so you are never guessing.

One last note: online calculators give you an estimate, not a law of physics. Treat the number as a starting point, eat at it for two weeks while tracking your weight, and adjust up or down by 100-150 calories based on what the scale actually does. Your real-world results always beat any formula.