How to Figure Out Your Maintenance Calories

Your maintenance calorie level — sometimes called your TDEE — is shaped by a handful of factors: your current weight, height, age, biological sex, and how much you move each day. There is no single universal figure, but a widely used method is to first estimate your Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) and then multiply it by an activity factor.

Step 1: Estimate your BMR

BMR represents the calories your body burns at complete rest — essentially what your organs need just to keep you alive. Common formulas (such as the Mifflin-St Jeor equation) use your weight in kilograms, height in centimetres, and age to produce an estimate. Many online calculators will do this arithmetic for you.

Step 2: Apply an activity multiplier

To get from BMR to TDEE, multiply by an activity factor — roughly 1.2 for largely sedentary days, up to around 1.7–1.9 for very active lifestyles. Most people on a GLP-1 weight-management plan fall somewhere in the 1.2–1.55 range, but this is a general guide rather than a precise rule. Working out your maintenance calorie target in more detail can help you refine this estimate over time.

Step 3: Understand what the number means

Once you have a TDEE estimate, you have a useful reference point. Eating consistently below it creates a calorie deficit; eating at it maintains your current weight. If you want to understand how to calculate a calorie deficit, that number flows directly from your maintenance figure.

How to figure out calories in food

Knowing your target is only half the equation — you also need to know what you are actually eating. Figuring out the calories in your meals can be done via nutrition labels, food databases, or — increasingly — AI photo scanning tools. The method you choose matters less than consistency; logging the same way day to day gives you the most useful picture of your intake.

A note on accuracy

All TDEE calculations are estimates. Two people with identical stats can have meaningfully different metabolic rates. Treat any formula-derived number as a starting hypothesis to test over two to four weeks, adjusting based on what the scale and your energy levels actually show. On a GLP-1 medicine, appetite changes can shift how much you naturally eat, so your real-world intake may sit well below your calculated maintenance without any deliberate effort — which is worth tracking carefully.

Calculating a maintenance figure by hand gives you a starting number, but keeping that number meaningful over weeks and months requires consistent logging — and that is where GLP Trackr's food-tracking tools make a real difference.

The app's AI photo scan lets you point your camera at a meal and get an instant calorie and protein breakdown, which is especially useful when appetite is low and you are eating small, varied portions. There is no need to search every ingredient manually. For packaged foods, the barcode scanner pulls nutrition data instantly.

Once you have set a daily calorie target inside the app, your logs feed into a running total so you can see at a glance whether you are eating at, above, or below your maintenance level on any given day. You can also set a protein target alongside your calorie goal — protein intake tends to matter a lot on a GLP-1 journey, where preserving muscle while losing fat is a common priority.

Over time, the app's insights features let you look at trends: how your intake has tracked against your target week by week, and how that relates to the weight changes you have logged. This kind of correlation view is far harder to spot in a spreadsheet or a notebook. For a broader look at energy balance on a GLP-1 plan, the calorie deficit hub covers the full picture.

GLP Trackr is a tracking tool, not a clinical service — the calorie targets it helps you log are yours to set and adjust. Any questions about the right intake level for your specific health situation are best discussed with your prescriber or doctor, who knows your full history.

Ready to stop guessing and start seeing your numbers clearly? Download GLP Trackr on the App Store or Google Play and explore it free for your first seven days.