Calorie Calculator

A calorie target tells you how much to eat in a day to move toward a specific goal — losing weight, maintaining it, or gaining it — rather than just showing your maintenance number the way TDEE Calculator does. This calculator takes your Total Daily Energy Expenditure and applies a flat, standard adjustment on top of it: subtract 500 calories a day to lose weight, add 500 to gain, or leave it unchanged to maintain.

That ±500 kcal/day figure comes from the widely used "3,500 kcal ≈ 1 lb of body fat" rule of thumb: 500 kcal/day × 7 days ≈ 3,500 kcal/week, which is approximately one pound of weight change per week. It's a population-average approximation rather than a guarantee for any one person — real weight change is influenced by water retention, sleep, hormones, and how consistently the target is actually followed — but it's the same convention used across most consumer calorie calculators.

Very low calorie targets can fall below what's generally considered a safe daily minimum. If your result lands under roughly 1,200 calories/day (women) or 1,500 calories/day (men), this tool flags it directly on the result — without changing the number itself — as a signal to check with a healthcare provider before following it. Recalculate periodically as your weight, activity, or goal changes, since the target is only as accurate as the stats behind it.