Maintenance Calories Explained: How to Find Yours

Every nutrition plan — fat loss, muscle gain or maintenance — starts with one number: how many calories you burn in a typical day. That number is your maintenance calories, also called total daily energy expenditure (TDEE).

What Makes Up Your TDEE

• Basal metabolic rate (BMR): energy your body uses at complete rest to stay alive. Usually the biggest portion, often around 60 to 70 percent.
• Thermic effect of food: energy used to digest food, roughly 10 percent of intake. Protein costs the most to digest.
• Exercise: planned training sessions.
• NEAT: non-exercise activity like walking, fidgeting, standing and chores. This varies enormously between people. See our article on NEAT.

Estimating With a Formula

Online calculators use equations such as Mifflin-St Jeor, based on age, sex, height and weight, multiplied by an activity factor. These estimates are a reasonable starting point but can easily be off by a few hundred calories, especially because people tend to overestimate their activity level.

Finding Your Real Number

The most accurate approach uses your own data:

• For two to three weeks, eat consistently and track your food as accurately as you can.
• Weigh yourself each morning under the same conditions.
• Compare your average weight in the first week with the last week.
• If your weight stayed stable, your average intake is roughly your maintenance.
• If you gained or lost, adjust: a change of about 0.5 kg per week corresponds to very roughly 500 calories per day above or below maintenance.

Maintenance Is Not Fixed

It changes with body weight, activity level and training. Losing weight lowers maintenance a little, because a smaller body uses less energy. Increasing daily steps raises it. Recheck every few months or whenever progress stalls.

Using It

• Fat loss: a moderate deficit of about 300 to 500 calories below maintenance.
• Muscle gain: a small surplus of 200 to 400 calories above.
• Maintenance: eat around the number and keep an eye on your weight trend.