Whether you want to lose weight, maintain your weight or build up on muscle mass: The number of calories needed and burned daily always plays an important role. Only if your body can burn more calories than you consume you can lose weight. Conversely, you can only gain mass in combination with weight training if you take in more calories. Even if you just want to maintain your weight, it is very practical to know how many calories you actually burn per day.
The total daily energy requirement of calories is made up of the basal metabolic rate and the calories actively burned through e.g. sport. With our online calorie deficit calculator you can easily enter all relevant parameters to calculate your daily calorie requirements.
The Calorie Deficit Calculator
How do I calculate my daily calories?
As mentioned at the beginning, your total daily energy requirement is calculated by adding your basal metabolic rate to the calories you actively burn, for example through sport or other activities.
The basal metabolic rate, also known as resting energy demand or resting energy consumption, is the energy that the body needs in one day to keep all its functions running: Respiration, digestion or blood circulation.
The basal metabolic rate varies from person to person. The main factors that influence it are age, sex, body weight and height. You can find out how to calculate your basal metabolic rate in our article on the Basal Metabolic Rate Calculator.
Anything that goes beyond this is called activity turnover or also performance turnover. This are all your physical activities that you perform throughout one day. Every physical activity burns additional energy and thus calories. This applies to all areas of your life in which your body is active, such as leisure, sports and work. In professions with a particularly high level of physical activity, the body automatically requires more energy than in a profession that is predominantly carried out in a sitting position, such as a normal office job.
Every physical activity has an empirically determined factor with which the power requirement is calculated.
How do I use my daily calorie requirements to reach my fitness goals?
If you know your daily calories, you can easily adjust them to your personal fitness goals.
If you want to lose weight, you need a calorie deficit. So you take in fewer calories than your body burns in a day. With this calorie deficit, your body uses stored fat reserves from which it gets the energy it needs and you lose weight.
If you want to maintain your weight, you do not need a calorie deficit or an excess of calories. You should consume exactly the amount of calories your body needs and burns. Of course, this does not have to be exactly this amount of calories. You may have consumed a little more calories one day and then consume a little less the next day.
If you want to build up mass, you need to consume more calories than your body can burn. Your body uses the excess energy to build up and store the mass. If you do weight training and want to build up muscle mass, foods that support muscle growth, such as foods containing protein or protein shakes, are of course particularly suitable.
With our calorie calculator you can set your personal fitness goals. It then calculates your needed calorie deficit or calorie surplus and tells you your daily calorie requirement including your target plan.
Fitness trackers are perfect for tracking your basal metabolic rate and your performance turnover and keeping an eye on them at all times. Here are some of the best and most common fitness trackers:
Other calculators & tools
To get even more exact values about your body, you can also use our other calculators:
- Body Mass Index Calculator
- Body Shape Index Calculator
- Waist-to-Height-Ratio Calculator
- Basal Metabolic Rate Calculator
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