Calorie Calculator
Estimate your daily calorie needs, with maintenance calories at the center and gentle, safe goal options.
Fill in your details to see your daily calorie needs.
How to use the calorie calculator
The tool needs five details to estimate your needs: sex, age, weight, height, and how active you are. Fill them in and the result appears on the right.
- Choose metric or imperial units and select your sex.
- Enter your weight, height, and age.
- Pick the activity level that matches a typical week.
- Read your maintenance calories first, then see how gentle goals shift that number up or down.
What are maintenance calories?
Maintenance calories, often called TDEE for total daily energy expenditure, are roughly what you burn in a day. Eat around that number and your weight tends to hold steady. It is the honest center of the result here, and a sensible reference point for most people.
The figure combines your resting needs with the energy used in movement and exercise. Because activity is hard to measure exactly, treat the number as a close estimate. Watching how your weight responds over a few weeks tells you more than any single calculation.
How calorie needs are calculated
The calculator starts with your basal metabolic rate using the Mifflin-St Jeor equation, the formula many dietitians prefer for its accuracy:
Men: 10 × kg + 6.25 × cm − 5 × age + 5
Women: 10 × kg + 6.25 × cm − 5 × age − 161
That resting figure is then multiplied by an activity factor, from 1.2 for a desk-bound day up to 1.9 for hard daily training, to reach your maintenance calories. A 30-year-old man at 80 kg and 180 cm with moderate activity lands near 2,759 calories a day.
Setting a goal safely
To change weight gradually, you can eat a little under or over maintenance. This tool offers only gentle steps: a deficit or surplus of 250 or 500 calories a day, which works out to roughly a quarter to half a kilogram a week. Slow, steady change is easier to sustain and gentler on your body than a sharp cut.
For that reason, the calculator will not show a loss target below a safe floor, around 1,200 calories for women and 1,500 for men. Eating under that, or below your resting needs, should happen only with support from a doctor or registered dietitian. These numbers are a planning aid, not a prescription, and they are not a substitute for professional advice tailored to you.
Frequently asked questions
- What is the difference between BMR and TDEE?
- BMR is the energy your body uses at complete rest. TDEE adds the calories you burn through daily movement and exercise, so it is higher. The maintenance figure shown here is your TDEE.
- Is it safe to eat below my BMR?
- Not without medical supervision. Your BMR covers only the energy your body needs at rest, so eating below it for long stretches can leave you short on fuel and nutrients. If your goal seems to call for that, speak with a doctor or registered dietitian first.
- How many calories should I cut to lose weight?
- A gentle deficit of 250 to 500 calories a day is a common, sustainable approach, leading to roughly a quarter to half a kilogram a week. This tool keeps to that range on purpose and will not suggest a sharper cut.
- Why won't the calculator show a very low calorie target?
- Very low intakes can be unsafe and hard to sustain. The tool holds any loss target at a safe minimum, about 1,200 calories for women and 1,500 for men, and points you toward professional guidance for anything lower.
- How accurate is the calorie estimate?
- It is a solid estimate for most healthy adults, but activity levels and individual metabolism vary, so the real figure differs from person to person. Use it as a starting point and adjust based on how your weight responds over a few weeks.