How many calories do you need per day?
How many calories you need depends on your body and how much you move. You can estimate it with two ideas: BMR and TDEE.
BMR: your resting burn
Your BMR (basal metabolic rate) is what your body burns at rest — breathing, your heart, your organs — without doing anything. A widely used formula is Mifflin-St Jeor:
- Men: 10 × weight(kg) + 6.25 × height(cm) − 5 × age + 5
- Women: 10 × weight(kg) + 6.25 × height(cm) − 5 × age − 161
Example: a 30-year-old woman, 70 kg and 170 cm, has a BMR of about 1,435 kcal a day.
TDEE: your total burn
Your TDEE (total daily energy expenditure) is your BMR plus everything you do. Estimate it by multiplying your BMR by an activity factor:
- Little movement (desk job): × 1.2
- Lightly active (1–3 workouts): × 1.375
- Moderately active (3–5 workouts): × 1.55
- Very active (6–7 workouts): × 1.725
For the example above, lightly active: 1,435 × 1.375 ≈ 1,970 kcal a day to maintain weight.
Picking a goal
- Maintain: eat around your TDEE.
- Lose weight: a deficit of about 500 kcal a day is roughly half a kilo a week. Don’t go too low — too strict is hard to keep up.
- Gain / build muscle: a small surplus, plus enough protein.
Important: these are estimates too
These formulas give a starting point, not exact truth. Two people with the same numbers can really differ by hundreds of calories. The only reliable test is practice: pick a goal, track it consistently for a few weeks, and see what happens to your weight. Nothing changing when you want it to? Adjust your goal.
In noots you set a daily goal and watch a calm progress ring. Combine that with your weight trend and you have enough to steer by — without it having to be exact.