How Many Calories Do You Actually Need? A No-Nonsense Guide

Every meal on our menu lists its calories, and the most common question we get is what to do with that number. Here's the short, honest version.

The rough estimate

For most adults, maintenance — the intake at which your weight stays where it is — lands somewhere between 1,800 and 2,800 calories a day. Where you sit in that range depends on your size, your sex, and above all how much you move. A quick way to estimate:

• Take your body weight in kilograms and multiply by 30 if you're mostly sitting during the day, 33 if you're moderately active, and 36 or more if you train hard most days.
• A 70kg person at a desk job with a few gym sessions a week: roughly 2,100–2,300 a day.

Formulas like Mifflin-St Jeor will give you a more precise number, but not a more accurate one — everyone's metabolism is a little different, and the only real test is what happens to your weight over a few weeks at a given intake.

Losing, keeping, gaining

To lose fat at a sustainable pace, eat around 300–500 calories below maintenance. That's about half a kilogram a week, which is the rate at which people keep it off. Bigger deficits work faster and fail more often. To gain muscle, eat 200–300 above, and train. To maintain, eat at maintenance — which is harder than it sounds, because most people have no idea what they eat on a normal day.

Why per-meal numbers help

You don't need to count every calorie. You need to know roughly what your regular meals cost, so the week adds up. If dinner is reliably 500–650 calories, lunch is similar, and breakfast is smaller, you're at 1,600–1,900 before snacks — and that tells you whether there's room for the extra or not. Meals with the number on them make that arithmetic possible without an app.

Protein matters more than the calorie total suggests

Two meals at 550 calories are not the same meal if one has 40g of protein and the other has 15g. Protein keeps you full, protects muscle when you're in a deficit, and costs more energy to digest. Aim for 1.6–2.2g per kilogram of body weight a day if you train; 1.2–1.6g if you don't. On our menu that's why every plate shows protein beside calories — for most people it's the more useful number.

Where Prepd fits

Our plates run from about 460 to 580 calories, with 26–43g of protein, and each one lists carbs and fat too. Build a box around your number: five or six plates at 550 with a decent breakfast is a very normal maintenance week; the same plates with a lighter breakfast is a gentle deficit. Nothing extreme, nothing to track.