The short answer
Your daily calorie target is your TDEE adjusted for your goal: about 500 kcal below it to lose roughly 0.5 kg per week, at it to maintain, or 200 to 400 kcal above it to gain muscle. Enter your details above to get your own number.
How is your daily calorie target calculated?
The calculator estimates your BMR (Basal Metabolic Rate) with the Mifflin-St Jeor equation, the formula a 2005 Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics review (Frankenfield et al.) identified as the most accurate for the general population. It then multiplies BMR by your activity level to get your TDEE, the calories you burn in a full day. Finally it applies your goal:
| Goal | Adjustment | Expected pace |
|---|---|---|
| Lose weight | TDEE − 500 kcal | About 0.5 kg per week |
| Maintain | TDEE | Weight stays stable |
| Gain muscle | TDEE + 300 kcal | Lean gain with training |
The calculator never recommends going below 1,200 calories for women or 1,500 for men. Below those floors it becomes hard to meet protein and micronutrient needs without medical supervision.
Why doesn't the number alone work?
Here is the uncomfortable part about calorie targets: people are poor at reporting what they actually eat. Validation studies that compare self-reported intake against doubly labelled water, the reference method for measuring real energy expenditure, find that 24-hour recalls underestimate intake by roughly 10 to 25 percent, and food frequency questionnaires by more still. In some groups the gap is larger. The deficit exists in the spreadsheet but not in the kitchen. Cooking oil, bites while cooking, weekend drinks, the dressing on the salad: it all counts and almost none of it gets logged.
That is not a discipline problem. It is a friction problem. When logging a meal takes two minutes of database searching, you skip it. Skip enough meals and the data is fiction.
CalAlly was built around removing exactly that friction. You describe the meal by voice: chicken salad with olive oil, a slice of bread, and an espresso. The AI breaks down every ingredient, estimates calories and macros, and logs it in one tap. About 3 seconds. And when you wonder how the week is going, the built-in AI coach answers from your real data.
How do you hit your calorie target consistently?
- Log everything for the first two weeks. The goal is calibration, not perfection. You learn what your typical meals cost.
- Pre-log dinner at lunch. Deciding earlier beats deciding hungry.
- Protein first. Higher protein intake preserves muscle in a deficit and keeps you fuller per calorie.
- Recalculate after every 5 percent change in body weight. Your TDEE drops as you lose; the target must follow.
- Expect imperfect days. One day over target is noise. The weekly average is the signal.
What if the number stops working?
A target that worked for a month can stall, and the usual cause is not a broken metabolism. As you lose weight your TDEE falls, because a lighter body costs less to move and maintain. A 500 kcal deficit at 90 kg is a smaller deficit at 80 kg, and eventually it becomes maintenance.
The fix is to recalculate rather than to cut harder. Update your weight, take the new target, and hold it for two to three weeks before judging. If your weekly average weight is flat over that window, the deficit has genuinely closed and a modest adjustment is warranted. Reacting to a single day on the scale, which mostly reflects water and food weight, is the fastest way to talk yourself into a deficit you cannot sustain.