Calorie Calculator

Activity level, translated into Indian jobs

The inputs are the usual ones: sex at birth, age, weight, height, then activity and the rate of change you want per week. Positive to lose, negative to gain, zero to hold.

Activity is where this calculator is won or lost, so here is what the levels mean in the jobs people around you actually do:

Level	Multiplier	Who this is
Sedentary	1.2	Software job in Bengaluru, cab both ways, no exercise. A bank clerk. Most of us.
Light	1.375	The same job plus a morning walk or a gym visit one to three days a week
Moderate	1.55	Exercise three to five days a week, or a job on your feet like retail or teaching
Active	1.725	Hard exercise six or seven days a week
Very active	1.9	A delivery rider all day, a farm worker in season, construction, a porter

The number that matters is how much you move over a whole week, not how tired the week felt. A long day at a desk is mentally exhausting and physically almost nothing.

From maintenance to target: the 7,700 kcal rule

Three steps. Basal metabolic rate by Mifflin-St Jeor, multiplied up to maintenance, then a deduction for the weekly loss you asked for. A kilogram of body fat holds roughly 7,700 kcal.

male:   BMR = 10 × kg + 6.25 × cm − 5 × age + 5
female: BMR = 10 × kg + 6.25 × cm − 5 × age − 161

maintenance = BMR × activity multiplier
daily cut   = (kg per week × 7700) / 7
target      = maintenance − daily cut

The default is a 34-year-old man, 70 kg, 165 cm, moderate activity, aiming to lose 0.5 kg a week.

BMR         = 10 × 70 + 6.25 × 165 − 5 × 34 + 5 = 1566.25
maintenance = 1566.25 × 1.55 = 2427.69
daily cut   = (0.5 × 7700) / 7 = 550
target      = 2427.69 − 550 = 1877.69

Maintenance calories	2,428 kcal
Daily calorie target	1,878 kcal
Protein	141 g
Carbohydrate	188 g
Fat	63 g
Safety check	Within a sustainable range

The split is 30 percent of calories from protein, 40 from carbohydrate, 30 from fat. Protein and carbohydrate give 4 kcal a gram, fat gives 9, which is why 63 g of fat is the same energy as 141 g of protein.

The 7,700 figure is for pure fat. What you actually lose in the first fortnight is mostly water and glycogen, which is why the scale drops fast and then slows down. Judge the rate over a month, not over a weekend.

Getting 141 g of protein out of a vegetarian kitchen

This is the line in the table most Indians will miss, and by a wide margin. The usual dal-roti- sabzi-rice day delivers something like 40 to 50 g of protein, most of it from cereals. The calculator’s 30 percent is deliberately on the high side, because protein is what keeps muscle when you eat less. Even 100 g would be a big step up.

Rough protein content, per usual serving:

Food	Protein, about
Katori of cooked dal	6 to 7 g
100 g paneer	18 g
Cup of curd (200 g)	7 g
Glass of milk (250 ml)	8 g
50 g dry soya chunks	25 g
Cup of boiled chana or rajma	12 to 15 g
Handful of peanuts (30 g)	7 to 8 g
One egg	6 g
Scoop of whey	24 g

A vegetarian day that gets near 140 g looks like: curd or milk at every meal, paneer or soya at one of them, chana or sprouts as the evening snack instead of biscuits, and usually a whey scoop in the morning. Eggs make it far easier if you eat them. Soya chunks are the cheapest protein in the shop by a distance, at roughly ₹150 a kilo, and nobody uses them.

Rebuilding the thali around 1,878 kcal

A standard lunch thali at a decent place, with two sabzis, dal, rice, four rotis, papad and a sweet, is well over 1,000 kcal before the ghee on top. Two of those and breakfast is the maintenance figure gone.

What actually works, in my experience, is not a new diet but a rearranged plate: two rotis instead of four, rice cut to half a cup, the dal and sabzi doubled, curd every meal, the sweet on Sundays. That keeps the food familiar, which is the only reason anyone sticks to anything past week three.

Cooking oil is the hidden line. A tablespoon is about 120 kcal. A household that goes through a litre per person a month is putting roughly 300 kcal a day into each person from oil alone, which is more than the entire 550 kcal cut in the worked example is trying to remove once you add ghee and a fried snack. Measure it with a spoon for a week and you will see where the number went.

When the target drops below the floor

The calculator refuses to pretend a very low number is fine. Below about 1,500 kcal for men and 1,200 for women it is hard to get enough protein, iron and calcium, and muscle loss speeds up, so the safety check flags it.

This trips women more often than men, because a smaller body has less room to cut. A 30-year-old woman, 60 kg, 155 cm, with a sedentary desk job, asking for the same 0.5 kg a week:

Maintenance calories	1,509 kcal
Daily calorie target	959 kcal
Safety check	Below 1200 kcal

Drop the rate to 0.25 kg a week and the target becomes 1,234 kcal, which passes. Or move the activity level up by actually adding the activity, which raises maintenance. Either is better than eating 959 kcal and giving up in ten days. Anything below the floor is a conversation with a doctor or a registered dietitian, and it is not something to run off a website.

For the burn figure on its own, without a goal, the BMR calculator shows the same equation with no deduction. Whether you should be cutting at all is a question for the BMI calculator on the Indian cut-offs, and, better, the body fat calculator, because a man of 70 kg can be carrying 14 kg of fat or 22 and the calorie target would be the same for both.