How Many Calories Do You Need to Maintain Your Weight?

Maintenance calories — sometimes called Total Daily Energy Expenditure (TDEE) — represent the amount of energy your body uses over a day when your weight is holding steady. It is made up of two main components:

• Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR): the energy your body uses at rest to keep basic functions running — breathing, circulation, cell repair. For most adults this accounts for roughly 60–70% of total energy use.
• Activity factor: energy used through movement, from gentle daily steps to structured exercise. The more active you are, the higher your maintenance figure.

Common estimation methods — such as the Mifflin-St Jeor or Harris-Benedict equations — use height, weight, age, and an activity multiplier to estimate TDEE. These give a ballpark figure, not a precise prescription; individual metabolism varies, and the result is a starting point to observe and adjust from.

On a GLP-1 journey, your maintenance number is not static. As body weight decreases, BMR typically falls too, which is one reason many people find progress slows over time — the target is moving. This is why understanding your ongoing maintenance calorie need matters throughout the journey, not just at the start.

It is also worth knowing how calorie surplus and deficit relate to changes in body weight — that context helps you interpret what your maintenance figure actually means in practice. For a broader look at calorie targets and how they are calculated, the GLP Trackr calorie calculator hub covers the full picture.

General educational ranges suggest most adults have a TDEE somewhere between roughly 1,600 and 3,000 calories per day, with considerable variation either side. Rather than treating any single estimate as definitive, use it as a hypothesis to test against your own logged data over several weeks.

GLP Trackr's food logging feature takes the manual effort out of hitting a calorie target. Rather than keeping a running total in your head — difficult at the best of times, and especially so when appetite is low and meals are smaller — you can simply point your phone camera at a meal and let the AI photo scan estimate calories, protein, and macros in seconds. Barcode scanning and a manual search are there for everything else.

Once your calorie target is set in the app, your daily intake is tracked against it automatically, so you can see at a glance whether you are around your maintenance level, below it, or above. You can also set protein and water targets alongside calories — useful on a GLP-1 journey where getting enough protein on a smaller appetite is a common challenge.

Over time, the app's insights surface patterns in your own data — how your food logging relates to your weight trend week by week — giving you something concrete to bring to conversations with your prescriber or doctor. For related guidance on maintaining weight through calorie awareness, the app's daily check-in and weight log keep that picture current as your body changes.

Calorie targets are general educational estimates, not a personalised medical prescription. Your prescriber or doctor is the right person to discuss specific nutrition goals with, particularly if you have any health conditions that affect dietary needs.

Ready to stop guessing and start seeing your numbers clearly? Download GLP Trackr on the App Store or Google Play and explore food logging, calorie targets, and weight tracking — free for your first 7 days.