Maintenance Calories Calculator

Maintenance calories — the amount you need to eat to hold your weight steady — is the most practically useful nutrition number you can know. With your maintenance level established, every diet decision becomes simple math: eat 500 less to lose a pound a week, eat 500 more to gain one.

The challenge is that maintenance is not a fixed number. It fluctuates day-to-day based on sleep quality, stress, exercise intensity, temperature, and dozens of other variables. The number this calculator provides is your estimated average maintenance — a useful target, but the real value comes from using it as a starting point and calibrating from there.

Many people are surprised to find their maintenance is higher or lower than expected. If you've been dieting for a long time, your maintenance may be suppressed by metabolic adaptation. In that case, gradually increasing intake toward the calculated maintenance level (reverse dieting) over several weeks can restore normal metabolic function before beginning a fresh structured weight loss phase.