Free calorie tool
Calorie Calculator
Pick a goal (lose, maintain or gain) and get one number: the calories to eat each day. It starts from what you burn and moves it by a pace you choose.
Worked example
For a 30-year-old man who weighs 75 kg and is 178 cm tall (lightly active), maintenance is 2,362 kcal. Losing weight at 500 kcal a day below that means eating about 1,862 kcal a day, roughly 621 kcal at each of three meals.
Calculate your daily calories
The result below starts from the example's numbers. Change any field and it updates as you type.
Track this target every day
Use the number above as your daily goal in CalorTracker, then log meals by photo, voice or text and see where your day stands against it. Free to start, no card needed to explore.
Results are estimates from published formulas, not medical advice. Your own body can sit above or below them.
Where the formulas come from, and how we check them: how we calculate.
How the calorie calculator works
It works out how many calories you burn in a day (your TDEE, from the Mifflin-St Jeor equation and an activity factor), then moves that number for your goal. Losing weight takes 250, 500, 1000 kcal a day below it, maintaining takes none, and gaining takes 250 or 500 kcal a day above it. The weekly pace shown is that daily change multiplied by seven and divided by the energy in a kilogram of body weight.
The conversion is the old rule of thumb that a kilogram of body weight is worth about 7,700 kcal (about 3,500 kcal per pound), which goes back to Wishnofsky (1958). It is an average. Hall and colleagues (The Lancet, 2011) showed that real weight change settles lower than that rule predicts, because a lighter body burns less, so read any timeline here as the earliest sensible estimate and re-run it at your new weight.
The lowest target we will give you
When you choose to lose weight, the target never drops below 1,200 kcal for women and 1,500 kcal for men. If a deficit would take you under that, the calculator stops at the minimum and says so. If your estimated maintenance is already at or under the minimum, it offers no deficit at all. Eating less than that is something to do only with a doctor or registered dietitian.
Which calculator do you need?
- This one answers "how many calories should I eat?" for any goal, in one number.
- The TDEE calculator shows what you burn, and the maintenance calories section explains eating at that level.
- The calorie deficit calculator adds a goal weight and a timeline, and the weight loss calculator works backwards from the date you want.
- The macro calculator turns a calorie target into grams of protein, carbs and fat.
A target only helps if you can see where you are against it. Log meals in CalorTracker by photo, voice or text and the day's total updates against the number you set here.