Enter your sex, age, height, weight, and activity level to calculate your daily calorie needs for losing, maintaining, or gaining weight.
How to Use the Calorie Calculator
Fill in sex, age, height, and weight, pick an activity level from the dropdown, then choose Lose, Maintain, or Gain — that last choice is what shifts the target-calorie figure up or down by 500 calories.
How many calories should you actually eat in a day? This calculator chains together the two numbers that answer it: how many calories your body burns at rest, and how much more a typical day on top of that adds.
Men: BMR = 10W + 6.25H − 5A + 5
Women: BMR = 10W + 6.25H − 5A − 161
Maintenance = BMR × Activity Multiplier
Target = Maintenance ± 500 (Lose / Gain)W is weight in kilograms, H height in centimeters, A age in years. This is the Mifflin-St Jeor equation, published in 1990 and the same formula behind this site's dedicated BMR Calculator — what this tool adds on top is the activity multiplier and the goal adjustment, aimed at the practical "how many calories should I eat" question rather than the underlying BMR figure alone.
Activity Levels Are Broad Categories, Not Measurements
Sedentary uses ×1.2, Lightly Active ×1.375, Moderately Active ×1.55, Very Active ×1.725, and Extremely Active ×1.9 — standard tiers used across dietetics for estimating total daily energy expenditure. Most people, left to self-assess, pick a category more active than their actual week looks; "moderately active" is a generous description of three gym visits squeezed between a desk job and a commute. The multiplier chosen moves the maintenance number by hundreds of calories, so it's worth being honest here rather than aspirational.
The ±500 adjustment for the Lose and Gain goals comes from the old but still widely used approximation that roughly 3,500 calories corresponds to a pound of body weight — divide that across a week and it lands near 500 calories a day. Real physiology is messier: metabolic rate itself shifts as weight changes, and the relationship between calorie balance and the scale isn't a perfectly straight line. Treat 500 as a reasonable starting adjustment to revisit after a few weeks of real data, not a guaranteed pound-a-week outcome.
An estimate, not a prescription. The BMR formula, the activity multiplier, and the 500-calorie adjustment are all population-level approximations — actual needs vary by individual. Talk to a doctor or registered dietitian before using this target to plan a significant calorie deficit or surplus.