Maintenance Calories: What are they and why are they so important?

Maintenance calories are the number of calories required to maintain your current weight when considering your activity level and metabolic rate. Getting the right balance between calorie intake and expenditure is fundamental for weight maintenance. BUT, finding your maintenance calories is also important because without knowing your maintenance calories how can you possibly know if your placing yourself into the required deficit or surplus to achieve your goals, whether that be weight loss of muscle building. You simply can’t.

Why Do Maintenance Calories Matter

Maintenance calories are the baseline for various fitness goals, whether you're aiming to lose weight, build muscle, or simply sustain your current physique, understanding this baseline is crucial - without it its simply guess work. Your maintenance calories form the foundation for crafting personalised plans that aligns with your objectives.

Ask yourself this… if you wanted to lose weight how would you decide how many calories to eat?

I’ve been party to many conversations in which people often say “I’m going on a diet”, “I’m only going to eat a thousand calories a day”, “I’m cutting out carbs”. Put simply this is a really uneducated way of doing things, there’s simply no substance behind these methods. In fact cutting calories too low can have a detrimental effect on any progress, so its important that when you want to lose weight you do it slowly, steadily and in a sustainable way so that when you reach your target or your goal your able to stay there.

Understanding the concept of maintenance calories is an important step towards a sustainable and balanced lifestyle and to ensure your results stay for good.

In this blog, I’m going to tell you how you can calculate your maintenance calories.

I’ve often been asked the question “How many calories do you eat and what’s your macro split?” - I refrain from discussing my calories and here’s why…

My metrics are as follows… 5’10”, female, I’m a lot taller than the average female. If I shared my calorie and macros split with someone who is lets say 5’2 they would likely put on weight. My individual size, frame, age and activity level dictates that I will eat a lot more than the average female. My calories and macros are likely to have detrimental effect on someone else’s progress and probably result in excessive weight gain.

Maintenance calories are bespoke to every individual because everyone is different.

How to Calculate Maintenance Calories:

There are many free calculators online however their accuracies can vary, the most popular is the tdeecalculator.net or if you would like us to workout your maintenance calories with our bespoke tried and tested methods which will be guaranteed to get you the results you want then contact us.

REMEMBER if calculating your own maintenance calories this is not an exact science, so whilst a very good indication you will need to trial and make adjustments.

Trial and Adjustment

Start with your estimated calories from your tdee calculator and monitor your weight over a few weeks. If you maintain your weight, you've found your maintenance calories. If not, adjust your calorie intake gradually until you achieve weight stability.

Tailoring Nutrition to Your Goals

Once armed with your maintenance calories, you can tailor your nutrition plan dependent on your goals.

• Weight Loss: Consume fewer calories than maintenance.

• Muscle Gain: Consume more calories, prioritizing protein for muscle synthesis.

• Maintenance: Balance calorie intake with expenditure for weight stability

Remember, these calculations provide a starting point. Individual variations, lifestyle changes, and metabolic adaptations (ill talk about this in a later blog) may influence your actual maintenance calories. Flexibility and adaptability are key to long-term success.

If you’ve got no interest or time for the trial and error approach contact us so see how we can quickly get you started with our online personal training and start getting you the results your looking for contact us.

Conclusion:

I believe that mastering maintenance calories is the cornerstone of a successful fitness journey and its certainly worked for me. (But remember as you progress your maintenance calories are likely to change so its important to keep monitoring this and make changes where necessary or you could plateau). Getting this aspect right will empower you to navigate your goals with precision in a sustainable and informed approach. It’s an empowering journey which puts you back in the drivers seat and in full control.

This will be a learning process which you can try to navigate alone or we do recommend getting some professional help from people like ourselves who have been through the process, this will ultimately take away any guess work. Weight loss is not instantaneous so you must learn to celebrate the small victories along the way which may not always be a decrease in weight on those scales.

Here's to achieving and maintaining the best version of yourself! Remember if you have any questions don’t hesitate to contact us.

Got something you want to ask or have us answer, contact us and we will be sure to blog about it soon.