What is a Calorie Deficit?

A calorie deficit is the same thing as a caloric deficit: it’s a shortage in the number of calories you should eat to maintain your current weight. 

People trying to lose weight intentionally operate at a calorie or caloric deficit for obvious reasons: if you lower your daily calorie intake to consume less than your body needs to maintain your current body weight (energy homeostasis), your body burns reserves (i.e. body fat) in order to function properly and consequently loses weight. 

What’s the Right Calorie Deficit to Lose Weight? 

To gain weight, you need to eat more calories than your body burns on a daily basis. So it makes sense that if you’re looking to lose weight, you need to craft a diet plan where you eat an amount of calories that totals less than your body burns on a daily basis.

To do this, you practice calorie counting and healthy eating and monitor your food intake. But, as with most things, the right deficit is not one size fits all. The correct total number of calories for you to operate at a safe deficit depends on a number of factors, including your sex, age, your weight, your height, your physical activity, and how much weight you want to lose.

To calculate your calorie deficit, you first determine your Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) or Resting Metabolic Rate (RMR) based on age, gender, height, and weight.  BMR and RMR are used interchangeably and refer to the number of calories you need to perform the most basic and essential functions like breathing. Then you factor in your daily activities to identify how many calories you need each day just to maintain your current weight. By knowing your daily calorie needs, you can calculate a calorie deficit based on your weight-loss goals.

There are calculators that can help you determine the right calorie deficit for you. These calculators determine your BMR or RMR, essentially how many calories you should eat to maintain energy homeostasis (your everyday functioning without losing weight), then tell you how many calories you need to eliminate (burn through exercise or more likely subtract from your daily caloric intake) to achieve your weight-loss goal.

Using a Macro Calculator to Determine the Right Calorie Deficit

If you’re attempting to lose weight, a macro calculator will help you determine a safe, sustainable calorie deficit—i.e. one that won’t make you so tired or hungry that you can’t stay on the diet. It will tell you how many calories you should eat to maintain your current weight, factoring in your sex, age, weight, height and activity level. Then it will tell you what percentage of calories you should cut daily to achieve your desired weight loss (the calorie deficit needed to reach your goal). 

A macro calculator will also tell you how many of your daily calories should come from fat, protein, and carbohydrates on a ketogenic diet. This, along with tracking what you eat so you don’t eat more than you think and so you also make sure to eat the right amounts of fat, protein, and carbs, is essential to successfully meeting your weight-loss goals. 

Fortunately, we have an easy and convenient calculator here on this website. The Keto-Mojo MyMojoMacros calculator  will individualize your macros (daily calories broken into fat, protein, and carbohydrates) for a ketogenic diet based on your personal data, activity level and fat-loss goals. Start calculating your macros here!

The Final Word

A calorie deficit is a shortage of calories needed to maintain your current weight. To lose weight through dieting, you need to determine the right calorie deficit to achieve your weight loss goals then craft eating habits supporting the deficit. The right calorie deficit for you depends on your sex, age, weight, height, activity level, and weight-loss goals. Using a macro calculator helps you best understand a caloric deficit that’s safe for losing weight in a healthy way, allows for success over a reasonable amount of time, and takes into account specific things about you and your body. Once you know the right calorie deficit for you, you can adjust your diet to eat less food or lower-calorie foods, control portion sizes, and of course eat fewer calories. As with all new diets, it’s a good idea to consult your physician or a registered dietitian before starting a new diet. 

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Macros were around before the keto diet. But minding them has gained major popularity thanks to the keto diet. Why? Because the keto diet is based on eating large amounts of good fats, drastically reducing your carbohydrate intake, and moderately limiting protein intake so that your body burns fat for energy instead of glucose.

But along with eating more fat and less protein and carbs, it’s also about consuming the right amounts of each based on your goal to lose fat or even maintain your weight.

Maybe your macro goals are around weight loss ,or perhaps they’re in conjunction with specific fitness goals, like a goal to build muscle. Or perhaps you have certain health goals, like reversing diabetes, maintaining a healthy weight, or using a special meal plan as adjunct therapeutic treatment for medical conditions.

Either way, this is where “macros” (short for macronutrients) come in.

What are Macros?

Macros, short for macronutrients, are the daily calories your body needs to achieve your goals while on the low-carb keto diet, broken into categories of optimal grams of fats, grams of carbohydrates, and grams of proteins (i.e. macro ratios). They are also your literal map for keto success. (In contrast, micronutrients are vitamins and minerals.)

But there’s not one daily macros sweet spot that works for everyone.

How to Calculate Macros

The optimal amount of macros is different for each person, based on age, height, weight/body composition, activity level, body fat percentages (this is different than BMI), and weight goals.

How do you know what your optimal macros should be? The easiest way to determine the correct amounts is to use a macro calculator like the MyMojoMacros calculator.  Just input the requested information (such as your current weight, age, gender, etcetera) and it will calculate the breakdown of proper calorie intake, protein, carbs, and fat needed for you to lose, gain, or maintain your weight, depending on the health goals you set. (Expect a calorie deficit if you want to lose weight.)

Regardless of what number of calories are recommended, the general consensus within the keto community is that you want to keep your net carbs to 20 or less grams per day to lose weight, unless you’re an active athlete, in which case you can up your net carbs a bit. 

Note: Factors such as age, gender, family, and personal medical history, and genetics influence how your body responds to specific macronutrients and whether or not they help keep your body in ketosis. For this reason, we recommend you discuss your intended diet with a medical provider or registered dietitian who knows your health history, has an understanding of the ketogenic diet, and can help you make choices that are best for you around healthy eating, fat loss, meal plans, and low-carb diets.

How to Track Your Macros

Once you know your macros, you should count (track) them to give yourself the best chance to get and keep your body in a ketogenic state. 

Calculating your macros means knowing the total amount of calories, fat (ideally healthy fats), protein, and “net carbs” (described below) for everything you eat and drink and keeping track of them each day to ensure you don’t surpass your daily goals.

Yes, it’s a bit of work, especially if you want to be concise, eat fewer calories to lose weight, and make sure your eating habits support ketosis; you’ll need to count calories, read nutrition labels, ideally focus on whole foods (like meat, dairy, and veggies), monitor portion sizes, and ideally use a food scale and macros tracking app to make sure your calculations are precise (more on this below).  And yes, everyone gets off track now and then. But don’t be discouraged. It’s all part of the journey and after a while, it really does become second nature.

We know from experience that it’s easy to fool yourself into thinking you’re eating within your macros when you’re actually exceeding them. We also know that once you start keeping track and eating to your macros, you’ll find you’re less and less hungry over time and have far better overall success (including more stable blood-sugar levels!). Plus, it’s kind of fun, and definitely empowering, to see cool charts and graphs of your daily food intake. 

You can manually track your daily macros intake or calculate your totals using an app, such as Cronometer, MyFitnessPal, or Carb Manager (see our review on keto apps here) or an online recipe analyzer like the one at Happy Forks. (NOTE: If you purchase the Keto-Mojo Promo Bundle, you’ll receive a 20% discount off the Cronometer Gold subcription.)

What Are Net Carbs?

Plainly put, “net carbs” are the total grams of carbohydrates in any given food minus its grams of sugar alcohols and fiber. Here’s the basic formula:

Net carbohydrates = total carbohydrates – fiber – sugar alcohols (if applicable).

If you are not familiar with sugar alcohols, we tell you all about them here.

Here’s an example of the net carb calculation, using a medium avocado, which, incidentally, does not contain sugar alcohols:

A medium avocado contains 17.1 grams of total carbs and 13.5 grams of fiber. So, to get its net carbs, you subtract the fiber (13.5 grams) from the total carbs (17.1 grams), which leaves you with 3.6 grams of net carbs (i.e., 17.1 grams carbs – 13.5 grams fiber = 3.6 grams net carbs for 1 medium avocado). Talk about reason to enjoy guacamole!

What Now?

Now that you know about calculating macros, you have the power to set your daily intake of macros to manage your body weight, ketosis, and calorie goals, not to mention to get even more familiar with keto terms. Speaking of, here’s a new one to keep you going: “iifym.” It’s an abbreviation you’ll see used in blogs, on social media, and beyond and it means “if it fits your macros.” So go on and get ready for an educated next keto meal, including a keto treat, provided it has the right calories and grams of carbs. In other words, iifym!

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There’s been more interest than ever in BMI numbers (body mass index numbers) since the coronavirus outbreak of 2019 for one important reason: obesity (one of the BMI weight status markers) has been connected to a higher risk of severe COVID reaction. But that’s not the only reason to be curious about BMI values. When you start investigating your health or weight loss, you’re likely to come across the terms BMI, BMR, lean body mass, and fat body mass. 

These terms refer to important biomarkers that help you understand your body’s composition and gauge whether it needs adjusting, presumably through diet, exercise, or both.

Read on for clarity and help determining your own BMI percentile, BMR, and body mass composition. 

What is BMI?

BMI stands for “Body Mass Index,” which is a standard measurement of a person’s weight with respect to her or his height and also an indication of health risk based on weight. 

Your BMI number is based on a simple mathematical calculation and is a common indicator of your total body fat and whether you qualify as “underweight,” “normal,” “overweight,” or “obese,” based on World Health Organization (WHO) guidelines. 

The higher your BMI score, the greater your total body fat percentage. 

Here’s the breakdown of BMI percentiles for an adult, according to the World Health Organization (WHO):

Thus, a “normal” BMI score, or a normal weight range for a person’s height, is between 18.5 and 24.9. Below the “normal” range is underweight and above is overweight. 

How to Calculate Your BMI

There are two ways to determine your BMI — through a table offering you an estimate or through a mathematical formula, which will give more concise results. 

BMI Estimate

To estimate your BMI, match your height in inches to weight in pounds in the following table from the National  Institutes of Health (NIH) National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI):

Body Mass Index Table 1 (for people with BMI of 35 or less)

Body Mass Index Table 2 (for people with BMI greater than 35)

BMI Calculation

There are online BMI calculators that calculate BMI, but you can calculate your BMI with the following mathematical formula provided by the CDC:

BMI = (weight  in pounds) ÷ (height in inches²) x 703

Here’s an example of how to use the calculation, using a person who is 150 pounds and 65 inches tall:

1. First, square the height in inches (65² or 65 x 65 = 4225). 
2. Then divide the weight in pounds (150) by the height squared (4225); so that’s 150 divided by 4225 = 0.03550296. 
3. Now, times the result by 703 (0.03550296 x 703 = 24.9585799). Thus, the BMI for a person who is 150 pounds and 65 inches is 25. 

The metric equation is as follows: BMI = (weight in kilograms) ÷ (height in meters²)

Risks for People with a High BMI

What’s the obsession with BMI? It has everything to do with optimal health versus health problems. An ideal weight keeps you in a better position for better health conditions, while a heightened amount of body fat (i.e. obesity) is attributed to higher risk for a variety of undesirable health conditions. Following are a variety of increased risk factors that accompany a high BMI: 

• high blood cholesterol or other lipid disorders
• type 2 diabetes
• heart disease / cardiovascular disease
• hypertension
• stroke
• high blood pressure
• certain cancers
• gallbladder disease
• sleep apnea and snoring
• premature death
• osteoarthritis and joint disease

Now that you understand BMI, let’s explore BMR.

What is a BMR Basal Metabolic Rate?

Your body burns a specific number of calories to perform its basic, life-sustaining functions, such as breathing, processing nutrients, producing cells, and circulating blood. The number of calories your unique body needs to sustain its most basic, essential functions is your BMR or basal metabolic rate. 

On an average daily basis, you burn more calories than your BMR just doing normal daily activities like working, walking, cleaning, or gardening. For the average person the BMR accounts for between 60 to 75 percent of your daily Total Energy Expenditure (TEE). 

Another term you might hear in relation to BMR is RMR (resting metabolic rate); they’re often used interchangeably. What’s the difference between BMR and RMR? Not much. Your BMR is the minimum number of calories your body needs to function, while your RMR (or REE, resting energy expenditure) is the number of calories your body burns at rest. In other words, they’re essentially the same thing but looked at through a slightly different angle. 

In either case, your BMR can be used to help you gain, lose, or maintain your weight. By knowing how many calories you burn, you know how many to consume.

How to Calculate your BMR 

There are a number of BMR formulas; however, the most recognized and accurate formula for calculating BMR is the Mifflin-St Jeor equation. Because of its accuracy, here at Keto-Mojo, we use this formula for our MyMojoMacros calculator to calculate your daily calorie burn based on your activity level. 

The calculation is fairly straightforward. The results indicate how many calories you need daily for your body to perform life-sustaining functions:

BMR for Men = (10 x weight in kilograms + 6.25 x height in centimeters – 5 x age in years + 5)

BMR for Women = (10 x weight in kilograms + 6.25 x height in centimeters – 5 x age in years – 161)

Here’s an example of how to use the BMR calculation for men, using a man who is 190 pounds, 72 inches tall, and 45 years old:

1. First convert the weight in pounds into kilograms by multiplying the weight in pounds by .454 (190 x .454 = 86.26 kilograms)
2. Next convert the height in inches into centimeters by multiplying the height in inches by 2.54 (72 x 2.54 = 182.88 centimeters)
3. Now plug the numbers into the formula: BMR for Men = ((10 x 86.26) + (6.25 x 182.88) – (5 x 45) + 5) or 1,786 daily calories 

The total number of daily calories a man of this size, weight, and age needs in order to perform only the most basic life-sustaining functions, without doing a stitch of exercise or anything else, is nearly 1.800 calories. 

Here’s an example of how to use the BMR calculation for women, using a woman who is 150 pounds, 66 inches tall, and 45 years old:

1. First convert the weight in pounds into kilograms by multiplying the weight in pounds by .454 (150 x .454 = 68.039 kilograms)
2. Next convert the height in inches into centimeters by multiplying the height in inches by 2.54 (66 x 2.54 = 167.64 centimeters)
3. Now plug the numbers into the formula: BMR for Women = ((10 x 68.039) + (6.25 x 167.64) – (5 x 45)- 161) or 1,342 daily calories.  

The total number of daily calories a woman of this size, weight, and age needs in order to perform only the most basic life-sustaining functions, without doing a stitch  of exercise or anything else, is nearly 1,350 calories. 

Once you know your basic BMR, you can determine how many calories you need each day in order to lose weight, gain weight, or maintain your current weight by factoring in your activity level and then determining your optimal daily calories from fat, protein, and carbohydrates (macros) in order to reach your goal. (See below for more on this.)

This is the basis for our MyMojoMacros macro calculator; it determines how many calories you need to sustain your life and daily activities, factoring in how many calories you burn based on your average daily activity level. Here’s how to make the calculation for what you need to maintain your current weight:

1. Determine which of the following categories below best describes your daily activity level.
2. Use its suggested calculation to find your optimal daily calorie intake. 

BMR Activity Level Formulas

• Sedentary: minimal or no exercise. Multiply your BMR by 1.2.
• Lightly active: you exercise lightly 1 to 3 days a week. Multiply your BMR by 1.375.
• Moderately active: you exercise moderately 3 to 5 days a week. Multiply your BMR by 1.55.
• Very active: you engage in hard exercise 6 to 7 days a week. Multiply your BMR by 1.725.
• Extra active: you engage in very hard exercise 6 to 7 days a week or have a physical job. Multiply your BMR by 1.9.

So, as an example, let’s take the woman who is 150 pounds, 66 inches tall, and 45 years old and consequently has a BMR of 1,342. If she’s moderately active, she multiplies her BMR (1,342.14) by 1.55 to understand her daily caloric requirements for eating enough to maintain her current weight. Since 1,342.14 x 1.55 = 2,080, her total daily calorie intake should be 2,080.32 daily calories. If she wants to lose weight, she’ll have to eat less calories per day. (Read about calorie deficits here.) If she wants to gain weight, she’ll have to eat more. 

Regardless, results using this formula are an estimate. The formula would be more accurate if it included additional factors, such as body composition and weight history. But it’s still a good indication of your BMR.

Speaking of other factors, let’s talk about lean body mass versus fat body mass. 

Lean Body Mass Versus Fat Body Mass

The body is made up of a variety of elements, including blood, bones, muscles, skin, and more. But when evaluating the health of your body, a common biomarker is determining how much of your body is comprised of lean body mass and fat body mass. 

In simple terms, lean body mass (LBM)—comprised of bones, ligaments, tendons, internal organs, and muscles (muscle mass)—is the difference between your total body weight and your body-fat weight. So, fat body mass is the difference between your total body weight and your lean-body weight. 

LBM usually averages between 60 to 90 percent of total body weight for the average person, and men generally have a higher percentage of LBM than women do. The BMI (body mass index discussed above) takes into account how much lean and fat body weight an average, healthy person would have based on their height, then gives an estimate of your body’s fat and lean composition based on their weight. 

While BMI is the most commonly used predictor of lean versus fat body mass, it is not the most precise way to identify whether you have a “healthy” amount of fat, especially because it doesn’t take into account various physiques, such as a muscular one or a more flabby but thin one (commonly described as “skinny fat”). A truer indication of how much fat versus lean body mass you are carrying can be found through bioelectrical impedance analysis (BIA), which is a test that passes an imperceivable current through your body and measures its speed and resistance (it moves faster through fat-free areas due to its higher water content) then plugs the results into a mathematical equation to conclude your total body fat, fat-free mass, and water. Even more valid and reliable is underwater or hydrostatic weighing. This test is done by submerging the person taking the test into a water tank, having them expel all the air from their lungs, and measuring their body’s mass per unit volume. Both the BIA and hydrostatic weighing are available to the general public; if you’re interested, ask your primary care physician for more information on these tests and where to get them. 

The Final Word

Your BMI is a calculation and biomarker for determining whether you’re at a healthy weight or can benefit from gaining or losing weight; it’s based on your height in comparison to your weight. While the commonly used formula to calculate your BMI is a solid estimate, there are more accurate ways to determine your true fat to lean body mass ratio. Your BMR is an indication of how many calories you need daily to perform basic life-sustaining functions; it fluctuates based on how active your lifestyle is. Body composition can be generally broken down into lean body mass and fat body mass; identifying your body’s composition of fat and lean body mass is important to understanding your general health. Understanding all of these terms, their calculations, and what your results are, give you insight into predictors of your general health and are good starting places for understanding whether you’re at a “healthy” weight. 

Should you calculate your BMI and find that you’d like to lose weight, decrease your waist circumference (excessive waist size is another marker for health risks), and feel better overall,  speak with your healthcare provider. It’s always a good idea to get medical advice before changing your diet. Plus, what’s good for younger people isn’t the same for older people.

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