Your Maintenance and Fat Loss Calories

Your Maintenance and

Fat Loss Calories

Maintenance calories for runners, built from your actual weekly mileage and gym sessions. Plus a fat loss target that won't cost you speed.

Liam Laverty · 2:45 marathon · 1:16 half

You

Units

Sex

Age

Weight (kg)

Height (cm)

Body fat % (optional) Only fill this in if it came from a DEXA or a decent scan. A guess makes the number worse, not better.

Training

Running per week (km) Your average week, not your biggest.

Strength sessions per week Roughly an hour each.

Outside of training, your day is mostly

Where are you in your training? A heavier block means a smaller deficit.

Racing a half or full marathon in the next 8 weeks?

Your numbers

Maintenance 0 kcal per day

Fat loss target 0 kcal per day

Where it comes from

Resting (BMR)	0
Daily life	0
Running	0
Strength	0
Maintenance	0

Run it for a week, then adjust

Start as high as you can.Eat the fat loss target, not less. Only come lower when the scale trend tells you to.
Weigh in every morning.Take the 7-day average and compare it to last week's average. Ignore single days.
Adjust off the trend.Losing 0.5 to 1% of bodyweight a week: hold. Barely moving after 2 weeks: take off 100 to 150 kcal. Losing faster than 1%: add 100 to 150 back.
Take photos every 2 weeks.Scale weight is noisy for runners (water, glycogen, gut contents). Photos and how your clothes fit fill the gaps.
Take the deficit from easy days.Eat closer to maintenance on interval and long run days. Pull the calories from rest and easy days. Hard sessions underfuelled are wasted sessions.

Pull the plug if you get: heavy legs all the time, interval sessions feeling flat, fitness going backwards, poor sleep, low mood or irritability. Go back to maintenance and speak to a professional.

Your week changes. Retake this when your mileage, weight or training phase changes. It's not a set-and-forget number.

Your week changes. Your number should too.

Build this around your actual week and adjust it as you move through training phases. It's not a set-and-forget number. Calculators get you in the right postcode. I coach runners 1-1 on training, strength and nutrition so the fat comes off and the times keep dropping.

See how 1-1 coaching works

Method: Mifflin-St Jeor for resting burn (Katch-McArdle if you enter body fat), the same equations calculator.net and tdeecalculator.net use. Running is costed at roughly 1 kcal per kg per km, strength at about 3.5 kcal per kg per session. Fat loss target is 0.5 to 1% of bodyweight per week, set by your training phase and body fat, capped at 500 kcal a day (700 in an easy block) and never below your resting burn. It's an estimate. Your scale trend over a few weeks is the real answer.

Where should I send them?

Your week changes. Your number should too.