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Measure Maintenance Calories From Your Log
Your maintenance calories are the average daily intake at which your weight holds steady. This page measures them from your own log: paste at least a week of morning weigh-ins and your average intake, and it reads the weight trend and gives maintenance with a range. Four weeks narrows that range to about ±105 kcal a day.
Worked out in your browser. Nothing you enter is sent or stored.
No log yet? Estimate it from your age, height and weight first.
Paste your morning weights and your intake, then press Work out my maintenance. Your number and its range appear here.
Maintenance, in the units of your log
– kcal a day
Want to keep your weigh-ins? Create a free account.
How this works
- The trend. A straight line is fitted through your morning weights by least squares, the same fit a spreadsheet’s SLOPE function gives. Dates are used as dates, so a missed morning is a gap, not a shifted point.
- Into calories. The slope is converted at the conventional 7,700 kcal per kilogram (Hall, International Journal of Obesity, 2008). Hall shows it overstates the energy per kilogram for leaner people, about 5,900 in his example, so the result shows that figure too.
- Maintenance is your average logged intake plus the daily gap the trend implies: if weight fell, you ate below maintenance, so maintenance is higher than your intake.
- The range is the wider of two 95% ranges. One comes from how much your own weigh-ins scatter around the line. The other comes from a published day-to-day spread of 0.53% of body weight, from 9,521 standardised mornings of one man over nearly thirty years (Schneditz et al., Renal Failure, 2023). The wider one wins, so a lucky fortnight cannot promise more than the arithmetic allows.
- The intake side adds nothing to the range. A log that runs high runs high every day; that cancels here. Which way you log matters less than keeping it: see six ways to track calories compared.
- The notes. A run that is not whole weeks is flagged because weight is highest on Sunday and Monday and falls through the week (Orsama et al., Obesity Facts, 2014); a morning more than 2% from the day before is flagged because that is nearly four times the 0.53% day-to-day spread.
The whole method, with what spoils it (weekends, festive weeks, changing how you log): How To Find Your Maintenance Calories From Your Own Log
Questions
How is this different from other maintenance calorie calculators?
Most calculators estimate maintenance from an equation: your age, sex, height, weight and an activity level. This one measures it from your own log, using the trend in your morning weigh-ins and your average intake. The equation describes people like you. The log describes you.
How many days of weigh-ins do I need?
At least 7 to get a number at all, 14 for a coarse check, 28 for an answer. For an 80 kg person with the published day-to-day noise, 14 days of weigh-ins pins maintenance to about ±300 kcal a day and 28 days to about ±105.
Why does it give a range?
Because morning weight wobbles by about half a percent from one day to the next, and a few weeks of wobble limit how precisely the trend can be read. The range is the wider of two: one from your own weigh-ins, one from a published record of nearly thirty years of mornings.
Is my data sent anywhere?
No. Everything is worked out in your browser. Nothing you paste is sent to a server or stored on your device.
What is TDEE?
Total daily energy expenditure: everything you burn in a day. At a steady weight it equals your maintenance calories, which is why the two names are used for the same number. A calculator estimates it. Your log measures it.
Why doesn’t this page give me a calorie target or deficit?
Because it measures; it does not prescribe. It is a method page, not medical advice, and a target depends on your health, history and goals, which a calculator cannot know. What it can give you is the number you actually burn, from your own log.
Built by Yap Pat Yih, founder of Habitus Mind.