How many calories to maintain my weight?
For a 165 lb woman, 5'5", age 35, lightly active
- Calories at rest (BMR)
- 1,444 a day
- Maintenance calories (TDEE)
- 1,990 a day
- To hold your weight
- eat around that number
- If it creeps up over a few weeks
- trim about 100 a day
Opens the TDEE Calculator. Free, no account needed.
Maintenance calories are just your TDEE, the total you burn in a day once you add activity on top of your resting metabolism. Eat around it and your weight holds. Eat under it and you lose. Eat over it and you gain. That is the whole model.
The calculator estimates it with the Mifflin-St Jeor equation, which is the one I trust for a starting point. It takes your resting burn and multiplies it by an activity factor. In the example above that puts a lightly active woman near 1,990 a day.
Treat that number as a hypothesis, not a fact. Real bodies vary, activity is hard to rate honestly, and the equation is an estimate. Here is the trick that makes it work anyway: eat at the number for two to three weeks and watch the trend. If your weight is steady, you found it. If it drifts up, trim about 100 a day and watch again. Your true maintenance is whatever the scale says it is, and the calculator just gets you close enough to start.
Recheck it when your weight changes by 10 pounds or more, or when your activity shifts. Put your own stats in to get your maintenance number.
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