Calorie Calculator

A calorie (kcal on food labels) is a unit of energy. Everything you eat and drink supplies some, and everything your body does uses some — breathing, digesting, walking to the metro, lifting weights. Protein and carbohydrates provide about 4 kcal per gram, fat about 9 kcal and alcohol about 7 kcal.

Your body weight over weeks and months mostly reflects the balance between the energy you take in and the energy you use. Eat more than you use and the extra is stored; eat less and your body draws on stores, including fat. Day-to-day scale changes are mostly water, salt and food in your gut — the trend over two to three weeks is what tells you whether your calories are right.

It depends on your size, age, sex and — more than most people expect — how much you move. The calculator above gives you a personal estimate. As a reference point, here is what it estimates for maintenance for two reference adults (a 30-year-old woman of 55 kg and 155 cm, and a 30-year-old man of 65 kg and 170 cm — the reference body weights used by ICMR–NIN for Indian adults):

India's national figures (ICMR–NIN 2020) estimate about 1,660 kcal for a sedentary woman and 2,110 kcal for a sedentary man at those body weights. They come out higher because the official “sedentary” level assumes more daily movement than a modern desk-and-sofa day. If you sit most of the day and don't exercise, choose Sedentary in the calculator and treat the answer as a starting point.

To lose fat you need to eat less than your maintenance calories for long enough — a calorie deficit. The calculator offers two paces:

• Gentle (about 10% below maintenance) — easier to live with, good if you have less to lose, train hard, or have failed on aggressive diets before.
• Steady (about 20% below maintenance) — a common starting point for most adults with fat to lose. For many people it works out to roughly 0.3–0.6 kg a week at first.

We never suggest going below about 1,200 kcal a day for women or 1,500 kcal for men. Below that it gets hard to cover protein, fibre, vitamins and minerals, and hunger usually wins. If your numbers land close to those floors, the better lever is more daily movement rather than eating less. Very-low-calorie diets should only be done under medical supervision.

Expect the scale to slow after the first few weeks. As you get lighter you burn a little less, so an estimate that worked at 80 kg won't be exact at 72 kg — recalculate after every 4–5 kg lost. For a step-by-step method, read how to calculate your calorie deficit.

Building muscle is easier with a small calorie surplus, enough protein and a training plan that gets progressively harder. A bigger surplus does not build muscle faster — it mostly adds fat.

• Lean (about 5% above maintenance) — best for most people who already train, and for anyone who wants to stay fairly lean.
• Standard (about 10% above maintenance) — suits beginners, very active people and those who struggle to gain weight.

Aim for a slow scale increase of roughly 0.25–0.5% of body weight per month for experienced lifters, and a little more for beginners. Training is what tells your body to use the extra energy for muscle — see progressive overload for how to structure it.

On average men need more calories because they tend to be larger and carry more muscle, which burns more energy even at rest. The Mifflin–St Jeor formula reflects this with a 166 kcal difference between men and women of identical weight, height and age.

That difference is an average, not a rule. A tall, active woman can easily need more than a small, sedentary man. That is why the calculator asks for your actual height, weight and activity rather than giving one number per sex. If you know your body-fat percentage, add it — the calculator then uses lean mass (the Katch–McArdle formula), which removes most of the sex difference.

BMR (basal metabolic rate) is the energy your body uses at complete rest — keeping your heart, brain, lungs and organs running. For most people it is the biggest part of the day's burn.

TDEE (total daily energy expenditure) adds everything else: digesting food (roughly 10% of intake), daily movement like walking, chores and fidgeting, and planned exercise. TDEE is your maintenance calories — eat about this much and your weight stays roughly steady.

The calculator estimates BMR, multiplies it by an activity factor to get TDEE, and then adjusts TDEE for your goal. Want to go deeper into just one part? Use the BMR calculator or the TDEE calculator.

Any formula can be off by a couple of hundred calories for an individual. The fix is simple: use the number, then let your own results correct it.

1. Eat close to your target for 2–3 weeks. Weigh the food you eat most often for the first week — rice, oil, roti and nuts are where estimates usually go wrong. Our Indian food calorie chart gives values per katori, roti and 100 g.
2. Weigh yourself 3–4 mornings a week, after the toilet and before eating, and look at the weekly average.
3. If the average hasn't moved the way you wanted, adjust by 100–200 kcal a day and repeat. Women may find the trend easier to read by comparing the same week of each cycle.

1. BMR. By default we use the Mifflin–St Jeor equation: 10 × weight (kg) + 6.25 × height (cm) − 5 × age, then +5 for men or −161 for women. In a systematic review it predicted resting metabolism within 10% of measured values for more people than other common equations. If you enter body-fat %, we switch to Katch–McArdle: 370 + 21.6 × lean body mass (kg).

2. TDEE. BMR × activity factor: 1.2 sedentary, 1.375 lightly active, 1.55 moderately active, 1.725 very active.

3. Goal target. Fat loss uses −10% or −20%, muscle gain +5% or +10%. Fat-loss targets never go below 1,200 kcal (women) or 1,500 kcal (men). The weekly change uses the rough rule of 7,700 kcal per kg of fat; real-world loss slows over time as your body adapts.

4. Macros. Protein is 1.8 g/kg for fat loss, 1.6 g/kg for maintenance and 2.0 g/kg for muscle gain (for a BMI over 30 we use a reference weight instead, so protein isn't overstated). Fat is about 25% of calories and carbs make up the rest.