How many calories to maintain your weight

Maintenance is the calorie number where your weight stays put. Every other target is built from it — a deficit is maintenance minus something, a surplus is maintenance plus something — which makes it the most useful number in nutrition and the one people most often have wrong.

The short answer

For most adults, maintenance lands somewhere between 28 and 34 calories per kilogram of body weight, depending on how much you move. At 70 kg that's roughly 1,960–2,380 a day.

In pounds, that's about 13 to 15 calories per pound of body weight — roughly 2,000–2,310 a day at 154 lb. Same arithmetic, different unit; use whichever one you actually weigh yourself in.

That range is wide on purpose. It's a starting point, not an answer.

The calculator does the more careful version: it estimates what your body burns at rest from your age, height, weight and sex, scales that for how much you move on an ordinary day, then adds your training separately. You get a rest-day number and a training-day number, because those two days genuinely aren't the same and averaging them leaves you slightly under-fuelled when you train and slightly over-fed when you don't.

Once you have the calorie figure, the macro calculator splits it into protein, carbs and fat — and the TDEE and calorie calculator is there for when you want to re-run this without the article wrapped around it.

Why the formula is only a starting point

Every calculator on the internet, this one included, is running an equation fitted to a population. You are one person, and the equation has never met you.

The gap is real and it is not small. Two people matched on age, height, weight and sex can differ by several hundred calories a day. The reasons are mundane — how much you fidget, how much you actually walk versus how much you think you walk, how hard your sessions really are, what your thyroid is doing, how much muscle you carry. None of that is in the formula, because none of it can be.

So the honest framing is: the formula gives you a hypothesis. The scale gives you the answer.

How to find your real maintenance

You measure it. It takes about three weeks and it is genuinely simple:

1. Eat around the estimate. Take the calculator's maintenance number and eat close to it. Don't chase precision — close is fine.
2. Weigh yourself most mornings. Same conditions: after the bathroom, before food, minimal clothing. Daily weight swings by a kilo or more for reasons that have nothing to do with fat, so you are not reading any single morning.
3. Compare week to week, not day to day. Average your weigh-ins for week one. Do the same for week three. The difference between those two averages is your signal.
4. Adjust. If the average went up by about half a kilo across the fortnight, you were eating roughly 250 calories a day above maintenance — drop by that much. If it went down by the same, add it. If it barely moved, you've found your number.

That arithmetic works because a kilogram of body fat is worth roughly 7,700 calories. Half a kilo over fourteen days is about 3,850 calories, or 275 a day. Treat that as a rule of thumb rather than a measurement: over a fortnight some of the change on the scale is water and glycogen rather than fat, which is exactly why you want three weeks rather than one. You don't need to be exact; you need to be pointed the right way.

Your maintenance is not a fixed number

Once you have it, it will move. That's normal, not a betrayal:

• You get lighter. A smaller body costs less to run. Lose 10 kg and your maintenance falls by roughly 150–250 calories a day, purely because there's less of you.
• You move less than you think you do. In a prolonged deficit, unconscious movement drops — you take the lift, you fidget less, you're slower around the house. This is real and it is not a character flaw.
• You gain muscle. Muscle costs more to maintain than fat, though the effect is smaller than the internet suggests.
• Seasons change. A winter of short walks burns less than a summer of long ones.

Which is why maintenance is better treated as something you keep measuring than something you calculate once. The number you found in January is a fair guess for March and a poor one for September.

This is also the usual reason a diet stops working: the deficit you set against January's maintenance is roughly March's maintenance. Why am I not losing weight in a calorie deficit takes that apart properly.

What it feels like when you've got it right

Weight holds steady inside a band of about a kilo or two, and drifts within that band rather than trending. You aren't hungry all the time. You aren't forcing food down. Your training doesn't feel harder week over week. Nothing dramatic happens — which is precisely the point, and precisely why maintenance is hard to stay motivated for.

If that sounds unremarkable, it's worth saying plainly: being able to hold your weight on purpose is the skill that decides whether a fat-loss phase lasts. Anyone can lose weight for eight weeks. Holding the result is the part most people never learn, because they were never taught what maintenance is or how to find it.

Knowing the number is the first half. How to maintain weight after losing it is the second: what to do with it once the diet ends and the feedback goes quiet.

Let Sophia measure it for you

The four-step method above works, and it is also four weeks of arithmetic you have to remember to do. Sophia does it in the background. She starts from the same formula everyone else uses, tells you plainly that it's an estimate, and then watches what actually happens to your weight against what you actually ate. Around week three she replaces the estimate with a number measured from you — and keeps re-measuring it as your weight, your training and your life change.

You'll know when she does, because she'll say so, and she'll show you the arithmetic if you ask.