How Many Calories Do You Need to Maintain Your Weight?

Maintenance calories — sometimes called your Total Daily Energy Expenditure (TDEE) — represent the number of calories that keeps your weight steady over time. Eat consistently below that number and weight tends to fall; eat consistently above it and weight tends to rise.

The main factors that shape your TDEE

• Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR): the energy your body uses at rest, largely driven by lean muscle mass, height, weight, age, and biological sex.
• Activity level: movement throughout the day — both structured exercise and everyday activity like walking and standing — adds significantly to your total.
• Body composition: muscle tissue burns more energy at rest than fat tissue, so two people with the same weight can have noticeably different maintenance figures.
• Metabolic adaptation: over time, particularly during or after weight loss, the body can adjust its energy use. This is one reason progress is rarely perfectly linear.

How GLP-1 medicines interact with your calorie picture

Medicines like Mounjaro (tirzepatide) and Wegovy (semaglutide) act on appetite-regulating pathways, and many people report reduced hunger and lower food intake as a result. This means your actual calorie intake may drop considerably — sometimes without you fully realising it. Tracking what you eat helps you stay aware of whether you are getting enough protein and overall energy to support your health and muscle mass during a weight-loss phase, and later when you move toward managing ongoing weight loss.

General educational ranges suggest most adults have a maintenance figure somewhere between roughly 1,600 and 3,000 calories per day, but these are wide population estimates — your individual number depends on the factors above. A registered dietitian or your healthcare professional can help you work out a personalised target if you need one.

If you are also thinking about how different medicines compare during your journey, the Wegovy to Mounjaro conversion chart covers what changes between the two. And if weight-related health conditions are part of your picture, the page on weight-related comorbidities and Wegovy offers useful context.

Knowing your maintenance figure is only useful if you can see how your daily intake relates to it — and that is where consistent logging makes the difference. GLP Trackr's AI food scanning lets you point your camera at a meal and get an instant breakdown of calories, protein, and macros without manually searching every ingredient. On days when appetite is low and meals are small, this kind of effortless logging makes it far more likely you will actually keep track.

Once your calories are being logged, GLP Trackr's targets and insights features let you set a calorie goal, monitor your daily totals, and start to see patterns — for example, whether low-protein days correlate with energy dips, or how your intake shifts across the week. Over time, this gives you a clearer picture of whether you are eating at, above, or below your maintenance level, and a useful record to discuss with your prescriber or a dietitian.

For a broader view of your GLP-1 journey — doses, progress, side effects, and more — the Mounjaro tracking hub brings it all together in one place.

Start logging your meals and see your calorie picture clearly — download GLP Trackr on the App Store or Google Play and explore it free for 7 days.

GLP Trackr provides general information and tracking tools — it is not a substitute for personalised advice from your prescriber, doctor, or a registered dietitian. If you have questions about the right calorie target for your individual situation, your healthcare professional is the right person to ask.