Bo guide
Short answer
Maintenance calories — your TDEE — is the intake at which your weight stays stable. A calculator gives an estimate; the accurate way is to log intake for two to three weeks and see what your weight actually does.
General information, not medical advice. Written from published sources, which are listed at the end. It is not a substitute for a doctor, pharmacist or registered dietitian who knows your situation.
In this guide6 sections · 3 min
Maintenance is the single most useful number in nutrition, and almost nobody knows theirs. Every deficit and every surplus is defined relative to it, so guessing it means guessing everything downstream.
What it is made of
- BMR — what you burn at complete rest. Usually the largest share, around 60–70%.
- NEAT — everyday movement: walking, fidgeting, standing, gesturing. Varies enormously between people and is the part that quietly drops during a long diet.
- Exercise — usually smaller than people assume.
- Digestion — roughly 10% of intake, higher on protein.
Why NEAT wrecks every calculator
Resting metabolism is fairly predictable from height, weight, age and sex, which is what the formulas use. Everyday movement is not predictable at all, and it is the component that differs most between people.
Overfeeding research has found differences of well over a thousand calories a day between individuals in how much they unconsciously increase everyday movement when given surplus food — some fidget and pace it off, others simply store it. Two adults of identical height, weight, age and job can therefore have genuinely different maintenance figures, and no equation can tell you which one you are.
That is the entire case for measuring rather than calculating. A formula predicts the average person of your dimensions. You want the number for you.
Finding yours properly
- Log everything for two to three weeks without changing your eating. This is the hard part and the whole point — the aim is a true picture, not a good one.
- Weigh yourself daily and take a weekly average. Daily numbers are mostly water and will mislead you.
- Compare week one and week three averages. Flat weight means your average intake over that period is your maintenance.
- If weight moved, adjust by roughly 500 calories per pound per week of change and repeat.
A worked example
Three weeks of logging averages 2,450 calories a day. Weekly average weight goes 82.1 kg, 82.4 kg, 82.6 kg — so about 0.5 kg gained over the period, roughly 0.25 kg a week.
A kilogram of body fat is somewhere near 7,700 calories, so 0.25 kg a week is a surplus of about 275 calories a day. Maintenance is therefore around 2,175, not the 2,450 being eaten. A 400-calorie deficit means eating about 1,775 — a number that would have been pure guesswork from a calculator.
Why it moves
Maintenance is not fixed. It falls as you lose weight — a lighter body costs less to run — and it falls further during a long diet as NEAT drops, which is the adaptation people feel as a stall. It rises with muscle gain and with activity.
Practically: recheck it after every 5–10 kg of change, or any time a deficit that was working stops working. A number found six months and eight kilograms ago is not your number any more.
Eating at maintenance on purpose
Underrated. After a long deficit, a few weeks at maintenance lets hunger hormones and NEAT recover, and makes the next cut more effective. It is not lost time — it is what stops a diet ending in a rebound.
Expect the scale to rise a kilo or two in the first week, and expect that to be alarming. It is glycogen and the water bound to it, not fat regained; restoring carbohydrate intake restores both. Knowing this in advance is most of what stops people abandoning the break two days in.
It is also the goal state. Maintenance is where you spend most of your life; a deficit is a temporary tool. A diet with no plan for what happens at the end has only planned half of itself.
