Finding Your Maintenance Calorie Needs

When you first start out on your fitness journey, often times one of your goals is to CHANGE your body weight.  Either you want to eat less calories than you burn in order to lose weight, or you want to eat more calories than you burn to gain mass.  Eventually, though, you will hit your goal weight and then your approach shifts.  You will get to be on a maintenance calorie level. If you are to that point, congratulations!!  It shows that you put in the time and effort to shed your excess body fat or add some mass. For anyone starting out, the goal is not to be on fat shredder and at a deficit for the rest of your life! There is a light at the end of the tunnel and it’s called MAINTENANCE.

This is a great post to review for getting into the thick of summer too! Most of us have worked really hard to get leaner and stronger for summer. Now is the time to keep those results and not slide backward by fall.

Energy Balance

To put it in simple terms, we all operate with an energy balance. We expend energy throughout the day and use the calories we eat to compensate for that spent an energy. Your energy balance is what will decide whether you lose, gain, or maintain your current body weight. Being at a deficit (a negative energy balance – eating less calories than you burn in a day) will cause you to lose weight. Being at a surplus (a positive energy balance – eating more calories than you burn in a day) will cause you to gain weight. The middle ground of maintenance is where you are eating just as many calories as you burn each day.

All of these scenarios rely heavily on a running average. Just as one day of of good eating won’t cause you to be ripped, one day of bad eating won’t cause you to gain back all the way you’ve lost. That being said, one day of really bad eating (example: eating way too much when you’re trying to maintain a deficit) can weigh heavily on your average. If you’ve been averaging a deficit of -500 calories, the day of pigging out and eating an extra 1500 calories can effectively undo three days of your deficit. That’s why you’ve heard me say that one cheat day can set your progress back a few days.

Calculating Your Maintenance Need

I still recommend the P90X formula as the best place to start when calculating your maintenance need. It will use your base metabolic rate, daily activity, and add in an average workout burn. This is all based off your current weight. Below is a simple calculator that will give you your theoretical maintenance calorie need. All you have to do is enter your weight (in pounds).

*P90X Formula Maintenance Calorie Needs = (wt*10) + 0.2(wt*10) + 600

This is the amount of calories you need to maintain your weight, in theory. Real life can be a little different…

Finding Your TRUE Maintenance Calorie Need

This is where the work comes in. If you want to truly find your actual maintenance calorie needs you have to put your calculated calorie goal into practice and track it carefully. That’s the only way you’ll find out if the supposed maintenance calorie level is your true maintenance calorie level.  There are many variables that can cause your maintenance calorie needs to be higher than calculated or lower than calculated.

Higher Needs

If you’ve been blessed with a high metabolic rate you may begin to use your new calorie target only to find that you’re still losing weight. Maybe you have a really active job and the extra 20% for daily activity is not accurate for you. You could also regularly exceed the average workout burn of 600 calories that P90X uses in its formula. All of these factors could cause your maintenance calorie needs to be higher than calculated.

Lower Needs

The flip side of the coin is that your metabolic rate might be slower than what’s calculated. This can happen for a lot of reasons. Often slowed metabolic rate is a result of very prolonged and extreme deficits. That’s why I’ve recommended sticking to around 1000 calorie deficit as a maximum. A slowed metabolic rate is often why you see slower weight loss near the end of people’s journeys. Those last 10 pounds can be a lot of work.

A lower than calculated maintenance calorie need can also be the result of a very sedentary, inactive job. 20% for daily activity might be too high. And finally if your workouts are really short or not that intense, 600 calories for an average burn may be too generous.

Back to Finding Your TRUE Maintenance Calorie Need

After you find your new calorie goal it’s time to see where you stand. Start by working up slowly to your new calorie goal. Add 200 to 300 calories every 1-2 week until you hit your calculated need. Once you reach your new goal I suggest tracking that new goal for at least two weeks to see what effect it has on your overall weight. If you continue to lose weight, then add an extra 200 calories and check your weight again after a couple weeks. If after two weeks you gain weight, subtract 200 calories and repeat the process.

This is work. You have to be just as precise and just as accurate with your tracking to learn your maintenance diet as you did to lose or gain weight. The outcome is well worth the work. When you truly know your maintenance calorie needs you’ll have a great picture of your metabolic rate and the balance point for your energy balance. It can go either way too. You may be surprised with how FEW calories you need to maintain or shocked at how MANY calories you need to keep weight on. When you have more calories, you can push harder and harder. You’ll notice tons more energy and even better strength gains.

You will also want to adjust your macros to either 40/40/20 or 30/50/20 (protein / carbs/ fats) when you are ready to move up to your maintenance calorie needs. You’ll be eating plenty of calories and both 40% and 30% coming from protein is plenty. You don’t have to maximize your protein percentage like you do with Fat Shredder as you are no longer limited on calories.

What Happens at Maintenance?

Really cool things happen when you truly find your maintenance calorie needs. You get to experience the often desired (and highly exaggerated) balance of losing body fat while you gain muscle. CAUTION! Get your head out of the clouds! While you do lose body fat as you gain muscle at maintenance, it’s an extremely slow process. My entire second round was completed at maintenance. I maintained my weight and was able to chip away roughly 1% of my body fat. I got a lot more vascular and added some size. My goal was to perfect my results while pushing my performance.  That is why always recommend picking one goal (fat loss or building muscle) and directing your efforts to maximize that goal.

So will you see huge gains? No. Will you get totally ripped? No, not unless you already have low body fat. You are giving your body exactly what it needs every day and in doing so your fueling enough for some growth while the work you’re doing is also burning fat.

Takeaways to Finding Your Maintenance Calorie Needs

• Calculate your theoretical maintenance calorie needs with a formula.
• Slowly work up to that new calorie goal (add 200 – 300 calories a week).
• Run your new calorie goal for two weeks and check your overall weight.
• Adjust as needed to truly maintain your weight.

Then enjoy! You know what your body needs to maintain weight and you can manipulate that calorie goal for your goals. Run small surpluses to create some really lean gains or small deficits to slowly get shredded while protecting all of your hard-earned muscle.

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