This is not medical advice. General information for self-tracking only. If you are under 18, pregnant or breastfeeding, have ever had an eating disorder or a difficult relationship with food, or are managing a medical condition, talk to a doctor or a registered dietitian before you change your calorie intake. Coming off a deficit is a good moment to get that advice rather than a good moment to skip it. The full list is here.

What maintenance calories actually are

Your maintenance calories are the number that keeps your weight where it is. Eat that much on average and the scale stays put. Eat under it and you lose, eat over it and you gain.

Two things add up to it. There is your resting metabolic rate, which is what your body spends staying alive while you do nothing at all, and then there is everything you put on top of that by moving around and digesting food. A calorie calculator app estimates the first with a formula, then multiplies it by an activity factor to cover the second.

MyPlate uses Mifflin-St Jeor, and so does the calculator on this site. A systematic review of the four equations most used in clinical practice found it landed within 10% of measured resting metabolic rate in more people than any of the others, with the narrowest error range. The same review was blunt about what that still leaves you with: noteworthy individual errors, plus underrepresentation of older adults and US-residing ethnic minorities both in the studies that built the equations and in the ones that checked them.1

So treat whatever your app shows you as an estimate that can be meaningfully wrong for any particular person. Useful, but not the last word. Correcting it is the next section.

Worth knowing if you use MyPlate: maintenance is not a separate calculation. The app works out your maintenance number first, then multiplies it by 0.85 for a weight-loss goal or 1.1 for a gain goal. Setting your goal to Maintain just stops it applying a multiplier, so the target you see is the maintenance estimate itself.

How to find your maintenance calories

Two ways. The first takes about thirty seconds, and the second is the one that gets you closer.

The equation

Put your age, height, weight and activity level into a calorie calculator app and read off the number for maintaining weight. That is your starting point, and given the individual error the review above reports,1 it is better treated as the middle of a range than as a target you owe anyone precision against.

The observation

Eat roughly the same amount for two to three weeks. Track meals every day, weigh yourself most mornings, then put week one's average weight next to week three's. If the average held flat, your average daily intake across those weeks was your maintenance. If it drifted down by half a kilo a week, your maintenance sits a few hundred calories above what you were eating.

This gets closer because it quietly accounts for things no equation can see, like how much you fidget or how far you actually walk in a day.

Its weakness is obvious the moment you say it out loud: your own logs are the input. Under-log by 15% and you will arrive at a maintenance figure 15% too low, then spend a month wondering why eating at it makes you lose weight.

Three weeks is about the minimum that tells you anything. Week-to-week weight noise is large next to the change you are trying to detect, so one week of data is a coin flip.

Why the number falls after you lose weight

Here is where people come unstuck. Two different things are going on, and they usually arrive bundled together as "my metabolism is broken".

A smaller body costs less to run

Most of the drop is arithmetic. Take a 40-year-old man, 175 cm, low activity. At 90 kg the app puts his maintenance at 2,473 calories. At 80 kg, with nothing else changed, it puts it at 2,335. Ten kilos gone, and about 140 calories a day gone with them.

Nothing has malfunctioned. He is a smaller person now and smaller people are cheaper to run. But if he carries on eating the 2,473 that used to hold him steady, he gains, and it will feel like his body turning on him rather than like the subtraction it is.

Adaptive thermogenesis, and what it does not explain

On top of the arithmetic, measured expenditure often falls further than body size alone predicts. The most-quoted evidence for that is the six-year follow-up of "The Biggest Loser" contestants: 14 of the original 16, measured by indirect calorimetry at baseline, at the end of the 30-week competition, and six years afterwards. They lost an average of 58.3 kg during the show, and resting metabolic rate fell by an average of 610 calories a day. Six years on they had put an average of 41 kg back on, resting metabolic rate was still an average of 704 calories a day below baseline, and about 499 of that was metabolic adaptation, meaning the shortfall left over once their body composition and age were accounted for.2

That 499 gets quoted everywhere, almost always to argue that dieting wrecks your metabolism and regain is only a matter of time. The paper does not support that reading. Regain was not significantly correlated with metabolic adaptation at the end of the competition, and six years later the contestants who had kept the most weight off were the ones whose metabolisms had slowed the most.2

That second finding is the one I keep having to read twice. In this group the slowed metabolism travelled with successful maintenance rather than with regain, which makes it look like a proportional response to being smaller than you used to be instead of a penalty for having dieted. The authors describe it as proportional but incomplete.

Two limits, and neither is small. This was 14 people in a televised competition who lost an average of 58 kg on a regime nobody would design for a normal person. If you lost 8 kg over five months with a food tracker for weight loss and some ordinary exercise, the study is describing the far end of a scale you are nowhere near. Fourteen people also supports a description rather than a prediction about you.

Why the regain happens, and who avoids it

The shape of it is well described. Weight comes off, then a plateau, then progressive regain. A review of the long-term picture puts biological, behavioural and environmental drivers together as the cause rather than picking one of them, and lands on a recommendation that maintenance gets its own ongoing attention and its own counselling instead of the plan that produced the loss.3

That recommendation is the practical part. Whatever got the weight off is not what keeps it off, and most people stop doing anything at all at exactly the point where the job changes.

The idea that basically nobody keeps it off is still wrong, though. Around 20% of people with overweight succeed at long-term weight loss, where that means losing at least 10% of starting body weight and holding it for a year or more.4 A minority, and not a rounding error.

Members of the National Weight Control Registry, who had lost an average of 33 kg and kept it off for more than five years, report a fairly consistent set of habits: about an hour a day of physical activity, a low-calorie and low-fat diet, breakfast most days, weighing themselves, and eating much the same way on a Saturday as on a Tuesday. The same paper reports that it appears to get easier with time, and that after two to five years of holding a loss the odds of holding it longer go up considerably.4

One caveat, which matters more than the list does. The registry is a self-selected group of people who already succeeded, so it can tell you what maintainers do and cannot tell you that doing those things is what made them maintainers. Anyone handing you that list as a recipe, me included, has gone further than the data goes.

With that said, the weekday and weekend item is the one I would pick up first. It costs nothing, and tracking is what makes it visible in the first place. Your weight responds to the average, so two days of eating well above maintenance can quietly cancel five days of eating at it, and plenty of people who believe they eat at maintenance eat at maintenance from Monday to Friday.

Switching from a deficit to maintenance

The mechanical version, using MyPlate because that is the app I can describe from the inside. Any diet tracker app with a maintenance goal will do the same job.

Update your weight in Profile first, then set Goal to Maintain on the same screen. Order matters. Logging a weigh-in on the Weight tab records the weight but does not recompute your calorie target, so a stale profile weight means the app works out maintenance for the person you were back in March. I would not defend that as a design decision. Until it changes, correct the weight by hand before you switch goals.

Expect the target to jump by roughly 18%. A weight-loss goal sets your intake at 85% of maintenance, so coming back up to 100% is a bigger step than the 15% you took going down: someone eating 2,100 while losing will land near 2,470.

Do you have to ease into it?

The internet says yes, and calls it reverse dieting: raise intake by a small amount each week for a month or two instead of stepping straight up. I went looking for the evidence before writing this and came back with nothing. A PubMed search for controlled trials of reverse dieting turns up no test of the protocol at all, and the single paper matching the term is a 2025 qualitative study of how physique athletes experience restoring weight after a competition. Nobody can give you the correct grams per week, because nobody has measured it.

What I would do, gap and all: step straight to maintenance if the deficit was modest and you have had enough of it, or spread the increase over three or four weeks if a sudden jump would leave you staring at the scale. Both are reasonable. Neither is proven.

The scale will go up, and most of it is not fat

Expect a rise in the first week or two that you did not earn. Glycogen is stored in hydrated form, at roughly three to four parts water to one of glycogen, so putting carbohydrate back puts the water back with it. The classic description of this names exactly that: the exaggerated regain that appears when carbohydrate intake goes back up after a very low calorie diet.5 It is an old paper with 11 subjects in it, though the mechanism itself is not in dispute.

So expect a kilo or two, and do not act on it. Give it three or four weeks of weekly averages before you conclude anything about your maintenance number.

Whatever the arithmetic produces, MyPlate will not show a target below 1,200 calories a day for women or 1,500 for men, and that floor applies to a maintenance goal exactly as it applies to a weight-loss one.6 If your calculated maintenance comes out below the floor, that is a conversation with a clinician rather than something to work around with an app.

Your macro split shifts a little too. MyPlate moves from 28% protein, 45% carbohydrate and 27% fat on a weight-loss goal to 25, 47 and 28 at maintenance, all of which sit inside the official acceptable ranges. For the reasoning behind those numbers, macros explained covers it and the sources page has the citations.

What tracking looks like when you are not cutting

In a deficit you are hitting a number. At maintenance you are watching for drift, which needs less precision and more consistency, and that changes what calorie tracking is actually for.

Keep weighing yourself

This is the best supported maintenance behaviour I came across. Among 3,003 registry members who had lost at least 30 lb and kept it off for a year or more, those whose self-weighing frequency dropped over the following year gained an average of 4.0 kg. The ones who weighed themselves more often gained 1.1 kg, and the ones who kept their frequency the same gained 1.8 kg. That change in weighing frequency was independently associated with the weight change.7

Every group gained something. Nobody in that study held their weight exactly, including the people doing everything right, which is a much more useful benchmark than the zero most of us quietly set ourselves.

If you have heard that frequent weighing is bad for your head, a review of 17 longitudinal studies found regular self-weighing associated with more weight loss and not associated with adverse psychological outcomes such as depression and anxiety. It also notes that effect sizes varied widely between studies, as did what counted as "regular".8 That is an average across groups rather than a promise about you. If stepping on a scale reliably ruins your day, the finding does not apply to you and you should stop.

Set a band and a rule before you need one

Pick a weight two kilos above where you want to sit, and decide now what happens when the weekly average crosses it. Back into a deficit for three or four weeks, then return to maintenance. Making that decision in advance is most of the value, because it gets much harder to make once the number is already staring at you.

The two kilos are my own convention and not something a study handed me. What the research supports is the principle underneath it, that consistent weighing lets people catch gains before they escalate rather than after.7

Logging can go part-time

You do not have to log every meal forever. After a few months of counting calories to lose weight you already know roughly what your usual meals cost, and that knowledge was most of what tracking was buying you. A pattern that works is a full week of logging every month or two, or whenever the weekly average starts drifting, with weigh-ins in between.

If you are still building the habit rather than winding it down, the four-week habit rule is the more useful piece, and how to count calories covers the mechanics.

One last thing, and it outranks every number above. If watching the scale or logging food is making you anxious or preoccupied, stop and talk to a doctor or a registered dietitian. Maintenance should be the phase where this gets lighter. If it is getting heavier, the tool is working against you.

Common questions

How many calories do I need to maintain my weight?

There is no single number for it, because it depends on your size, age, sex and how much you move, and any range wide enough to cover most adults is too wide to act on. Take a starting figure from a calorie calculator app using the Mifflin-St Jeor equation, which landed within 10% of measured resting metabolic rate more often than the other common equations while still producing noteworthy individual errors.1 Then correct it: eat at that number for two to three weeks and see which way your weekly average weight moves.

Did my metabolism break from dieting?

Almost certainly not in the way you mean. Most of the fall in what you burn is simply that a smaller body costs less to run. There is a measurable extra effect on top, around 499 calories a day in the six-year follow-up of "The Biggest Loser" contestants, but in that same group weight regain was not correlated with it, and the people who kept the most weight off were the ones whose metabolisms had slowed the most.2 That was 14 people after an average 58 kg loss, far beyond a normal diet, so read it as an outer bound rather than a forecast.

Should I keep using a calorie counter app at maintenance?

Yes, though it can be far lighter than what you did in a deficit. The behaviour with the strongest support behind it is weighing yourself: among registry members who had kept weight off for a year, those who weighed themselves less often over the following year gained an average of 4.0 kg against 1.1 kg for those who weighed more often.7 Food logging can drop back to a full week every month or two, or whenever the weekly average starts drifting upward.

Is reverse dieting worth doing?

There is no controlled evidence either way. Searching PubMed for trials of reverse dieting returns nothing that tests the protocol, and the only paper matching the term is a qualitative study of physique athletes describing how they restore weight after competing. The weekly increments people quote are convention rather than finding. Stepping straight up to maintenance and easing up over a month are both reasonable, so pick whichever you will actually stick to.

How much weight will I gain when I stop the deficit?

Expect one to two kilos in the first week or two that is not fat. Glycogen is stored with roughly three to four parts water, so putting carbohydrate back puts the water back alongside it, and this is exactly the exaggerated regain described after very low calorie dieting.5 Judge your maintenance number on three or four weeks of weekly averages, never on the first week.

Is daily weighing bad for my mental health?

A review of 17 longitudinal studies found regular self-weighing associated with more weight loss and not associated with adverse psychological outcomes such as depression and anxiety, while noting that effect sizes and the definition of "regular" varied a lot between studies.8 That is an average across groups rather than a statement about you. If the scale reliably ruins your day, weigh weekly or stop, and if food tracking is tipping into preoccupation, talk to a doctor or a registered dietitian.

What to do this week

If you are coming off a deficit this week, four things do most of the work. Update your weight in the app and switch the goal to Maintain, so the target you are eating to matches the body you have now. Expect the scale to rise a kilo or so, and ignore it for three weeks. Decide the weight at which you will act before you get anywhere near it. And keep weighing yourself, because that is the habit the maintenance research backs most clearly.

The awkward part is that maintenance has no finish line, which is not how a diet is ever sold to you. What the registry data does suggest is that it gets easier: hold a loss for two to five years and the odds of holding it longer go up considerably.

Sources

Every figure above traces to one of these. If you find a number that doesn't match the source it claims, tell me and I'll correct it.

  1. Frankenfield D, Roth-Yousey L, Compher C (2005). Comparison of predictive equations for resting metabolic rate in healthy nonobese and obese adults: a systematic review. Journal of the American Dietetic Association, 105(5):775-789. Read on PubMed →
  2. Fothergill E, Guo J, Howard L, et al. (2016). Persistent metabolic adaptation 6 years after "The Biggest Loser" competition. Obesity, 24(8):1612-1619. Read on PubMed →
  3. Hall KD, Kahan S (2018). Maintenance of lost weight and long-term management of obesity. Medical Clinics of North America, 102(1):183-197. Read on PubMed →
  4. Wing RR, Phelan S (2005). Long-term weight loss maintenance. American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 82(1 Suppl):222S-225S. Read on PubMed →
  5. Kreitzman SN, Coxon AY, Szaz KF (1992). Glycogen storage: illusions of easy weight loss, excessive weight regain, and distortions in estimates of body composition. American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 56(1 Suppl):292S-293S. Read on PubMed →
  6. National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, NIH (1998). Clinical Guidelines on the Identification, Evaluation, and Treatment of Overweight and Obesity in Adults. NIH Publication 98-4083. Read the guidelines →
  7. Butryn ML, Phelan S, Hill JO, Wing RR (2007). Consistent self-monitoring of weight: a key component of successful weight loss maintenance. Obesity, 15(12):3091-3096. Read on PubMed →
  8. Zheng Y, Klem ML, Sereika SM, et al. (2015). Self-weighing in weight management: a systematic literature review. Obesity, 23(2):256-265. Read on PubMed →

The formulas and limits behind MyPlate's own numbers, with their citations, are on the health sources page.