What maintenance calories are
Maintenance calories are the daily intake at which your weight holds steady, with energy in matching energy out over the week. Technically the number equals your total daily energy expenditure, and the TDEE calculator digs into that expenditure math. This page is about the other half of the job: eating at that level on purpose — because you finished a cut, you are taking a diet break, or you want to know why the scale keeps drifting.
Maintenance is a 200-calorie band
Your daily burn is not one number. Steps, fidgeting, sleep, and even room temperature swing expenditure by a few hundred calories between days, and food choices shift water weight by 1–2 kg regardless of fat. So treat maintenance as a band about 100 kcal either side of the estimate. Inside it, your weekly-average weight stays flat. Say the calculator gives you 2,400 kcal: anywhere from 2,300 to 2,500 will look identical on the scale across a normal week, because a longer walk or a restless day erases the difference. The flip side deserves respect too: a miss of just 100 kcal a day, held for a year, is roughly 5 kg of drift. Small habits set long-term weight more than any single meal does.
What moves your maintenance
- Body weight itself. Every kilogram lost trims roughly 12–19 kcal from daily maintenance once activity is counted. Lose 10 kg and the intake that once held you steady now adds weight.
- Muscle. Lean mass is the expensive tissue, about 21.6 kcal per kg at rest. Building muscle nudges maintenance up; losing it in crash diets drags it down.
- Daily movement. The biggest lever. The gap between a 4,000-step day and a 12,000-step day is several hundred calories, more than most gym sessions burn.
- Age. Resting burn falls about 50 kcal per decade — the BMR calculator shows your resting piece — and activity usually falls alongside it. Training and steps offset most of the slide.
- Recent dieting. After a long deficit, metabolism runs 5–15% below what formulas predict for your new size. This adaptation fades over weeks to months of steady eating.
Eating at maintenance after a cut
The end of a diet is where results are kept or lost, and there are two workable exits. The direct one: move straight to your calculated maintenance and accept a 1–2 kg rise in the first fortnight — that is stored carbohydrate and water coming back, and none of it is fat. The gradual one, usually called reverse dieting: add 100–150 kcal per week until you reach the calculated number. Evidence does not crown either route, so pick by temperament. Either way, plan on four to eight weeks at maintenance before the next calorie deficit, and expect your true level to sit slightly under the formula at first while adaptation fades.
How to find your true maintenance
The formula lands within about 10% for most people; the confirmation is cheap. Eat the estimate for two to three weeks, weigh yourself each morning, and compare weekly averages. Flat average: you found it. Rising about 0.25 kg a week: eat 250 fewer. Falling: add the same. Two practical rules keep the data trustworthy. Weigh at the same time each day, after the bathroom and before food, since timing alone shifts the reading by a kilogram. And do not react mid-week — a salty dinner on Tuesday says nothing about fat. Three weeks of honest logging beats any equation, because it measures your body rather than the average one.
When to recalculate
Rerun the number after roughly 4–5 kg of weight change in either direction, whenever training or daily movement shifts for more than a few weeks (a new on-your-feet job counts), and at the end of any diet. To split your maintenance intake into protein, carb, and fat targets, the macro calculator takes it from here.
