Is 2,000 Calories a Day Right for You?
Ask how many calories you should eat a day and the answer that comes back is 2,000. That figure is a rounding decision made for food labelling in 1993. It was never a recommendation for you.
Your own number comes out of four things: your weight, your height, your age and how much you move. Get those four right and the estimate lands within about 10% for most people, which is close enough to start eating to and far too loose to treat as gospel.
Start with maintenance
Maintenance is what you burn in a day doing what you already do. It arrives in two parts.
Basal metabolic rate is what you would burn lying still for 24 hours, and it accounts for 60 to 70% of the total. The Mifflin-St Jeor equation is the one most dietitians reach for. For a 35 year old man at 85 kg and 180 cm, BMR comes to about 1,805 calories. For a 35 year old woman at 68 kg and 165 cm, about 1,406.
Then multiply by an activity factor. Use 1.2 for desk work with no training, 1.375 for light activity, 1.55 for moderate and 1.725 for heavy. The man above at 1.55 maintains on roughly 2,798 calories, the woman at 1.375 on roughly 1,933.
The calorie calculator does all of this from your own numbers and prints targets for losing, holding and gaining. BMR and TDEE explained covers what the two figures mean and why the second is the one you eat to.
The activity multiplier is where the error lives
Almost everybody picks one too high. Three gym sessions a week counts as light activity if you spend the rest of the week at a desk, and moderate means physical work or daily training. For the man above, the gap between 1.375 and 1.55 is 316 calories a day. That is the entire distance between losing slowly and sitting still.
When you are stuck between two, take the lower one. Choosing the right activity multiplier has the descriptions in plain terms.
Then adjust for your goal
- Losing fat: subtract 400 to 600, which is roughly 0.5 kg a week. Our example man eats 2,300, the woman 1,450.
- Holding weight: eat maintenance, then judge it on the scale trend over three weeks instead of three days.
- Gaining muscle: add 200 to 350. Go higher and the extra arrives as fat.
Do not drop below 1,500 a day as a man or 1,200 as a woman without supervision. Under those figures protein and micronutrient targets get hard to hit, and adherence falls apart shortly afterwards.
Treat your number as a hypothesis
Mifflin-St Jeor predicts measured BMR within 10% for about 82% of people, which leaves one person in five sitting outside that window. At 2,500 calories, being 10% out is 250 calories in either direction.
Test it. Eat the number for two weeks, weigh yourself in the same conditions, and read the trend. Wanted 0.5 kg a week and got 0.2? Take another 200 off. Lost 0.9? Add some back. Your scale is the measurement and the equation is the guess.
Two weeks is the minimum honest window, because water shifts of a kilo or more will bury the signal over anything shorter. Why scale weight fluctuates covers how much noise to expect.
Hitting the number is harder than picking it
People underreport what they eat by 20 to 40% on average, and the error runs largest in the people who most want it to be small. Oils, sauces, drinks and the handful of things eaten standing at the kitchen counter account for most of the gap. How wrong calorie tracking usually is goes through where it comes from.
Protein first, then the rest
Whatever your total, set protein first at 1.6 to 2.2 g per kg. It protects your muscle in a deficit, it is the most filling of the three macronutrients, and it costs energy to digest. Then fill the remaining calories with carbohydrate and fat in whatever split you will stick to. How much protein you need a day has the detail.
Scope and correction note, 26 October 2026: the ranges quoted here come from the American Council on Exercise and from published research, and they describe averages, not any individual. Nothing on this page is medical advice. If a figure here is wrong, tell us and we will correct it and date the correction. See the editorial policy and medical disclaimer.