How many calories can I eat a day?

Geschatte leestijd: 4 minuten “How many calories can I eat per day?” It’s a frequently asked question that we’ve addressed in various articles here. Here’s a brief overview of the key points to consider when determining your nutritional needs.

How many calories per day?

This question is often accompanied by a goal, usually to lose weight, but also often to gain weight, for example when you want to build more muscle mass. In both cases, the starting point is the same: you first calculate your maintenance calorie intake. By “maintenance,” we mean the amount of energy your body uses daily. Most of this is used for brain functions and organ functions, with a considerably smaller portion for your daily activity. Hence, simply increasing physical activity alone won’t do much to lose weight. From the maintenance need, you can then subtract or add calories depending on your goal. You can read about what a calorie is here.

Step 1: BMR

You can’t throw out a nice number for average nutritional needs. Individual differences are too large to have anything useful in averages. Science has been working on various formulas for decades to calculate personal nutritional needs. We’ve listed the most important of these formulas for you and converted them into calculators in the article “calculate your calorie needs”. First, you need to determine how much your body needs for all functions. The energy you need if you were to lie motionless in bed all day, the Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR). The most important variable here is the amount of lean mass you have, your weight minus your fat mass. The calculators I prefer, therefore, are those that work with your body fat percentage as given (such as those of Katch-McArdle). Other formulas are more practical because they calculate with data like gender, height, and weight (such as those of Harris-Benedict). Data that is easier to obtain than your body fat percentage. However, these calculators must assume average body fat percentages and therefore make assumptions about lean mass based on gender, height, and weight. If you are very lean and muscular, your needs in these calculators may be underestimated because muscle mass (which requires energy) is partly estimated as fat. No matter how well the calculator is set up and how often it has been validated in follow-up studies, it remains the best possible estimate of your personal reality. So you use this to start a diet with the best possible estimate. Your results will have to show how accurate this number was so that you can adjust.

Step 2: Activity factor

However, you only have the energy you need if you were to lie motionless in bed all day. To calculate how much extra energy you need for your daily activity, an ‘activity factor’ is used. With this, you multiply the outcome of the BMR to get the amount of calories you need to maintain weight, your maintenance need.

1. Little or no training, office work — x 1.2
2. Light training/sport 1-3 days a week — x 1.375
3. Average training/sport 3-5 days a week — x 1.55
4. Heavy training/sport 6-7 days a week — x 1.725
5. Heavy daily training/sport plus physical work or training twice a day, marathon, football camp, competition, etc. — x 1.9

The activity factor also poses a risk of misjudgment. People tend to overestimate their activity quite quickly, for example. If you want to lose weight, it’s better to underestimate this. If you want to gain weight, it’s better to overestimate this. Otherwise, there’s a good chance that the first weeks of your diet, even if followed correctly, will not lead to the desired result. This doesn’t have to be a disaster. The first weeks are always for testing how you respond to the calculated need. For motivation, however, it’s nice to see a positive result at the first measurement.

Step 3: Losing or gaining weight?

To lose weight or gain weight, however, another step needs to be taken. With steps 1 and 2, we’ve calculated your maintenance need, the amount of energy you need to maintain weight. The third step is determining whether you should go below or above this, and to what extent. This naturally depends on your goal. If you want to lose weight at a steady pace, for example, to maintain as much muscle mass as possible. Then you can go 5% below this maintenance need. If you have to fit into your wedding dress in 2 months, you can go 20% below this. You’ll lose weight faster (both in fat and muscle mass). However, there’s a good chance you’ll be a lot less happy in the weeks leading up to your wedding. Also, there’s a good chance that all the lost weight will come back immediately after or even during the honeymoon. The less you eat, the more your body tends to go into conservation mode and burn less energy. So when you start eating more again, this will lead to a faster increase in weight. The famous yo-yo. Slow weight loss therefore almost always has the preference.

Step 4: Macro distribution

However, you can’t yet put together your diet with just the number of calories. Where you get your energy from plays an important role. Especially which macronutrients the calories come from; from carbohydrates, fats, or protein. Often, simply replacing carbohydrates with protein, for example, can already result in less body fat and/or more muscle mass. What ratio you maintain also depends on your goal. However, we advise at most getting 50% from carbohydrates and dividing the rest between fats and protein. For example, 50% from carbohydrates, 30% from protein, and 20% from fats. 50-25-25 is also a fine option. Carbohydrates and protein both provide about 4 kcal per gram, fats 9 kcal per gram.

Your daily calories and diet in FITsociety App

Those are a lot of numbers. The good news is that you don’t have to calculate them yourself. With the calculators, you can calculate your maintenance need. In the FITsociety App, you can enter this and also indicate how you want to distribute this over carbohydrates, fats, and protein. Not only will you see exactly how many grams of all macros you need, but there are also already over 30,000 products listed with their nutritional values in the app. Simply enter what you eat, or want to eat, and the app will show you what this does for your macros and, of course, your intake. You can use the handy scanner function for this by scanning the barcode of products. Still too much effort, unsure how much you should be below or above your maintenance need, or what the best macro distribution is in your case? Then enlist the help of a coach. They will calculate your nutritional needs and can advise on creating a diet that meets them.