Maintenance Calories and Fat Loss

Maintenance calories can be defined as the number of calories that doesn’t cause weight gain or loss. This would be the total of your body’s required calories for organs and systems to function optimally, plus the calories required for your daily activities (work, training etc). If the number of calories you’re eating matches the number of calories used each day, weight remains the same. 

Your maintenance calories can be adjusted. For example, your body will up/down regulate systems to suit the supply of calories it’s receiving. Anyone who’s spent too long on a diet or gone to very low calories for a prolonged period will be able to relate to this; you drop calories, the weight starts to fall off only to slow and eventually come to a halt. There’s two reasons for this, firstly your body has down regulated systems to adjust to new amount of energy it’s getting and secondly people subconsciously move less when in a prolonged calorie deficit. This is often where you can get stuck. At a certain point, reducing calories further is no longer an option for health reasons as well as the limited effect it will have. Then there’s the misplaced fear that increasing calories will undo all the “good work” you’ve done to lose the fat. The fact is, unless you change something you’re not going to experience any further results. 

This is where maintenance calories come in and why that number is so important. By returning to a maintenance calorie intake we can not only give ourselves a break from the restrictive nature of diets but we can lay the foundations for a future diet phase if we haven’t achieved our fat loss goal. 

First we need to know what our maintenance calories could be. So how do we figure out what that number is? The simplest way is to multiply your body weight in pounds by 15. This will get you in the ball park. 

For example let’s say you weigh 80kg. To convert that to pounds multiply by 2.2, then again by 15 and there you go!

80 x 2.2 = 176

176 x 15 = 2640

So 2640 calories would be your maintenance calories.

(Other more complicated equations are available but this works time and again is as simple as it gets)

Bear in mind that when you increase calories you will get a small spike in weight as your body retains extra water. It’s not uncommon to see a 1kg gain overnight. Don’t panic, this will drop again over the next few days and you definitely haven’t gained 1kg of fat overnight. If this calorie intake is higher than you have been eating or you’re coming off the back of a diet you’re going to need to spend a bit of time in a maintenance phase before starting the next fat loss phase. The aim is to let the body settle and adjust to the new calorie intake. Don’t be in a rush to enter a calorie deficit again, if you don’t give your body time to settle your next diet phase won’t be as effective. I like to use a guide of at least the same length as your previous diet or a 3 month minimum if someone has been under eating for a long time.

If you’re happy where you’re at, just carry on with maintenance calories. If you still want to lose more fat then after the settling period you can enter another diet phase. If you’re looking to gain more muscle you’d increase again by about 10% and when your weight stops rising, repeat the increase.

Trust the process.