The biggest number in your day is the one you make lying still.
Every plan on this site ends in one daily figure, and that figure is three numbers of very different size stacked together. The largest of the three is fixed — it is your body idling, and no amount of training moves it. Which of the other two is bigger depends entirely on what you do for a living. Here they are, drawn to scale.
Where a day’s burn actually comes from
Three terms, one bar, drawn in proportion. The first is what you would burn lying still all day. The second is everything else you do. The third is the gym.
Six sessions, or one job
Every cell below is the same person — you — with a different job and a different number of sessions. Read along any diagonal and the number stops changing.
| Maintenance, kcal/day | Sessions a week | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | |
Moving it around the week changes nothing
Training days get more, rest days get less — that is what every plan on this site does, including ours. Here is the week it produces, with your daily target drawn across it.
How each figure is worked out
- Resting rate. Mifflin-St Jeor: 10 × kg + 6.25 × cm − 5 × age, then +5 for men and −161 for women. It is an estimate from a population, not a measurement of you; two people who match on all four inputs can genuinely differ by a few hundred kcal a day.
- The rest of your day is a multiplier on that resting rate: 1.15 at a desk, 1.30 on your feet, 1.45 in physical work. These are the conventional activity factors, and they are rules of thumb — the published ranges around them overlap.
- Training adds 0.05 to that multiplier per session a week. Because the multiplier applies to all seven days, one weekly session works out to 0.05 × resting rate × 7 — shown below the bar, so you can check it against what a session actually costs.
- The diagonal is not a coincidence and not a claim about the world. It falls out of the two constants above: one step of job is 0.15, one session is 0.05, so a step of job is three sessions and desk → physical is six. Different activity factors would move it; that they are three-to-one is a convention, and the page prints it rather than hiding it inside a total.
- The week gives training days target × (1 + 0.10 × rest days/7) and rest days target × (1 − 0.10 × training days/7). Multiply each by how many days of that kind there are and the swing cancels exactly, which is why the total does not move. Each day is then rounded to the nearest 10 for the table, and the total is the sum of the rounded numbers rather than the exact one — so what is printed adds up to what is printed.
- None of this is measured. No body-fat percentage, no metabolic test, no record of what you ate. Treat every figure as a starting estimate to correct against the scale, and take medical questions — including whether a deficit is a good idea for you at all — to someone who can examine you.
This is general information, not medical or dietary advice. Every figure on this page comes from a population formula, and conditions such as thyroid disease, diabetes, eating disorders, pregnancy and a long list of medications change what is appropriate. If any of those apply, the numbers that count are the ones your doctor gives you.