Calorie Calculator
Estimate the calories you need each day to maintain, lose, or gain weight. Enter your sex, age, height, weight, and activity level to get your BMR, TDEE, and calorie targets.
- Free, no account
- No watermark
- No usage limit
About the Calorie Calculator
Most calorie calculators do one thing and then quit. They hand you a number and wave you off. But the number is the least useful part. Knowing you get 1,800 calories a day says nothing about whether to spend them on chicken and rice or on cereal, and that choice matters more than the total does. This one gives you the number, your daily calories to lose, hold, or gain based on your sex, age, height, weight, and how much you actually move, then it keeps going. It splits that target into grams of protein, carbs, and fat you can build real meals from, and you can flip between balanced, high-protein, low-carb, and keto to watch the split redo itself on the spot. No sign-up, no email wall standing between you and the answer, and nothing you type ever leaves your browser.
How to use it
- Pick your units. US (feet, inches, pounds) is the default. Prefer centimeters and kilograms? Tap Metric and the boxes swap.
- Enter your sex, age, height, and weight. Those four feed the formula. Use your current weight, not your target weight, there's a reason and it's in the FAQ.
- Set your activity level honestly. This swings the result by hundreds of calories and it's the input people fudge most. Torn between two levels? Pick the lower one.
- Leave the formula alone unless you have a reason to change it. Mifflin-St Jeor is the default because it's what dietitians reach for now. If you've got a real body fat number from a DEXA scan or calipers, type it in the body fat box and Katch-McArdle turns on.
- Read your maintenance number, then tap a goal. Your maintenance (TDEE) sits up top. Under it is a ladder of six targets, from a fast cut to a slow gain. Tap the one you want and the macro panel underneath fills in for it.
- Copy it or share it. Copy results gives you a plain-text summary. Copy shareable link builds a web address that carries your whole setup, handy for a coach or a bookmark. Your last inputs stick on this device too.
The macros are the part that matters
Calories decide which way the scale moves. What those calories are actually made of is what settles the rest of it, how hungry you feel and whether the weight coming off is fat or the muscle you worked to build. That's the question nearly every calorie calculator ducks, and it's the one this tool answers, right under your target, in grams.
Protein comes first here, and we set it from your bodyweight instead of a flat percentage of calories. That's deliberate, and it's the single most important number on the screen. In a deficit, protein is what keeps your body burning fat for fuel instead of stripping muscle to cover the gap, and it's far and away the most filling of the three, which makes eating less a lot easier to put up with. The four diet buttons only decide where the calories left after protein land. Balanced holds fat near 30 percent and gives carbs the rest. High-protein pushes protein toward a gram per pound. Low-carb tips more of the day into fat so carbs drop. Keto pins carbs near 25 grams and sends the remainder to fat.
There's no magic ratio, and anyone selling you one is guessing. Get your protein in, then pick whichever split looks like food you'll actually cook. For most people that's the whole strategy.
It won't hand you a crash diet
Set the goal to "lose fast" and plenty of calculators will cheerfully spit out a 900-calorie target and send you on your way. Ours won't do that, it holds the target at a safe floor instead. If your deficit would push the number under 1,200 calories for women or 1,500 for men, it stops there, flags it, and tells you to slow down or check with a doctor first.
The floor is there because eating far under what you need, with nobody watching, usually backfires. You lose muscle along with the fat, your resting burn drops, and that combination is what makes gaining it all back so likely. A gentler cut you can hold for a few months just works better, and the savage version tends to fall apart around day nine anyway.
Activity level is where people blow it
If your calorie number comes out looking wrong, this setting is almost always the reason. Each level multiplies your resting burn, and two neighboring levels sit a few hundred calories apart, so guessing high is how people end up "in a deficit" that quietly isn't one.
The usual mistake is thinking one gym session bumps you up a whole level, and it really doesn't. An hour of hard training might be 300 to 500 calories against a full 24-hour day. What actually separates sedentary from moderately active is your baseline, the walking and standing and fidgeting spread across every hour, not the single sweaty session. Most people are more sedentary than they'd like to admit, that's just how desk life goes. So when you're unsure, pick the lower level. Undershoot a touch and it's an easy fix, you'll notice and eat a little more.
Treat the target as a starting bid
The tool shows two numbers. BMR is what you'd burn lying still all day, TDEE is that scaled up for how you move, and TDEE is your real maintenance. Both are built on population averages, so they fit the typical person your size, not you, and two people with identical stats can land 200 to 300 calories apart. So don't take the target as gospel. Eat near it for two to three weeks, weigh in the same way each morning, and go by the weekly average. If you're losing when you meant to hold steady, eat a bit more. Stuck after a fair trial? Trim 100 to 150 and reassess.
Frequently asked questions
Do I use my current weight or my goal weight?
Your current weight, every time. The math estimates what your body burns at the size it is right now, so feeding it a goal weight hands you calories for a body you don't have yet and wrecks the deficit before you notice. As you lose, your real burn drifts down with you, so come back and recalculate every 10 to 15 pounds to keep the target honest.
Which formula should I pick, and what's the body fat box for?
For almost everyone, leave it on Mifflin-St Jeor. It's the current standard and holds up well across a wide range of body types. Harris-Benedict is the older equation and tends to read a touch higher. Katch-McArdle is worth switching to only if you know your real body fat percentage, since it works off your lean mass instead of total weight, which makes it sharper for very lean or very muscular people. Type a body fat number in and that button turns on by itself.
Should I eat back the calories I burn at the gym?
No, and this one trips up a ton of people. Your activity level already folds exercise into the TDEE, that's the entire point of the multiplier. Eat those calories back on top of a logged workout and you've counted them twice, which is how a careful deficit stalls without anyone noticing. The exception is a genuinely huge one-off effort, a long hike or a race, and even then only add part of it back.
Why doesn't my number match another calculator?
Almost always one of two things. Either the other site defaults to a different equation, or you set a different activity level on each. Line up the formula and the activity setting between them and the gap usually closes. If it still doesn't, one of them is rounding somewhere odd.
Where do the activity multipliers come from?
Not from Mifflin-St Jeor or Harris-Benedict, which is worth knowing since they sit on the same screen. The equations are published research with coefficients you can look up. The five multipliers are a convention that grew up around them, loosely tracking the activity bands in the international energy requirement reports, and they are the least precise number on the page.
The scale won't move even though I'm eating my deficit. What gives?
Nine times out of ten it's the food log, not the math. Cooking oil, drinks with calories, a stray handful of nuts, the bites off someone else's plate you never wrote down, they add up faster than anyone expects, and people are famously bad at estimating their own intake. Weigh and log everything tightly for one honest week before you touch the calorie target. If it's genuinely accurate and still nothing moves, then drop by 100 to 150 and reassess.
Can I use this while pregnant or breastfeeding?
Better not to. Calorie and nutrient needs shift a lot through pregnancy and nursing, and an estimator built on non-pregnant averages will point you the wrong way. This is one to skip in favor of an individual plan from your doctor or a dietitian.
Does anything I enter get sent anywhere?
No. Every calculation runs on your device, and the page keeps working with no connection at all once it has loaded. Your height, weight, and age never touch a server. Share is the one place your numbers travel, and even there they sit after the # in the link, the part a browser never sends anywhere. Whoever you hand that link to can read them, which the Share row spells out before you copy it.