Calorie Deficit Calculator

Use The Food Stalker’s Calorie Deficit Calculator to find your required calorie deficit to reach a specific weight loss goal in your chosen timeframe. This tool, like our Calorie Calculator, will show you how many calories you need per day to lose weight, but it goes further, with more detail. It projects your weight loss, based on your calorie deficit, in a downloadable chart and spreadsheet!

Calorie Deficit Calculator for Weight Loss

To lose weight, you are going to need to maintain a calorie deficit. But how big or small should your calorie deficit be? How long do you need to maintain the deficit? Will a large calorie deficit outperform a smaller one in a significant way? These are the questions that The Food Stalker Calorie Deficit Calculator answers. It calculates what you need to do, calorie-wise, to lose weight and reach your target body weight. Get started right now by entering your current weight and weight loss goals, then follow the prompts to calculate your personal, downloadable plan.

So, what does your Calorie Deficit Calculator result mean? Here’s a quick explanation:

Calorie Deficit is Necessary

Understanding a Calorie Deficit

A calorie deficit is the difference between a relatively large calorie expenditure and a relatively smaller calorie intake. In other words, you get a calorie deficit when you eat less calories than you use. Less goes in than comes out. A good way to understand a calorie deficit is to imagine a filled bathtub, with the plug pulled and the faucet running at a trickle. Since there is less water entering than leaving, the water level in the tub goes down. The volume of water in the tub is like the volume of fat in your body during calorie deficit. It shrinks.

No Weight Loss

How to lose a pound per week

Here’s a simple example of how you can use a calorie deficit to manage your weight. Say you have maintained your weight for a few months, and you usually eat 2,500 calories per day. If you wake up one day and decide to stop eating snacks, and you usually eat 500 calories of snacks per day, you will have created a calorie deficit of 500. Your new daily calories eaten is now 2,000, forcing body to collect 500 calories from your fat stores. If a pound of fat has 3,500 calories, it’ll take you a week to lose a pound with your 500-calorie deficit (3,500 divided by 500).

Yes, this is a simple, theoretical, example but it illustrates the principle!

Yes Weight Loss

Simulating your Calorie Deficit Results

So, understanding a calorie deficit is nice and all, but what does it mean in practice? What’s the point of calculating your calorie deficit when you are trying to lose weight? Well, one of the main benefits of knowing this key number is that you get to realistically simulate your future weight loss over time. You can plan your life and make dietary changes for a defined time. Want to lose 5 pounds in 6 weeks and need to know your required calorie deficit? The Food Stalker Calorie Deficit Calculator crunches the numbers and simulates your progress, so you can give yourself milestones on your weight loss roadmap!

Using The Food Stalker’s Calorie Deficit Calculator

Let’s go through an example of how to use The Food Stalker’s Calorie Deficit Calculator, so that you can see how its done. If you follow the example, with your own inputs, you will be able to map out your weight loss journey and download a detailed plan based on your calculated calorie deficit:

Input Your Current Weight

Start out by putting your current weight into the calculator. This is your baseline from which you will progress to your target weight. You will also need to input your gender, age, height, and current physical activities/exercise level so that the Food Stalker Calorie Deficit Calculator can have enough data to apply the right formulae. If you are not sure about what your activity level is, click the “Estimate Your Level” button to get some options.

Set Your Target Weight and Date

Next, you need to set your goal body weight and the amount of time you aim to reach it by. It is best to be realistic about both your target weight and the timeframe. If you choose an unrealistic weight loss target, the calorie deficit calculator will display a friendly message guiding you to try again with a more achievable number.

Calculate Your Exercise Level

An important factor in any calorie deficit calculation is an estimate of your planned physical activity level. If you will put in extra workouts or take up a new, active hobby whilst on your diet, your calorie deficit will be enlarged. In this section of the calculator, you get to decide what factor of increased activity you will do to grow your deficit. If you plan on maintaining your current exercise level, just leave the input option at zero and click “Next Step”.

Get Your Calorie Deficit Calculation

And you are done! You now have a result similar to The Food Stalker’s Calorie Calculator, that is, a calculated estimate of the number of calories you need to reach and maintain your goal weight. In other words, you have just calculated your calorie deficit! You could just make a note of these numbers and move on right now, but why do that when you can take a much deeper dive into your calorie deficit by clicking the “Expert Mode” button?

Review Your Body Fat Loss Projection

The Expert Mode shows you much more detail, including a granular weight loss simulation which provides a range of possible results. The first thing you’ll see is your baseline and target weight, BMI, and Body Fat Percentage. You will also see (and be able to edit) the length of the simulation, so that you can get an idea of what is likely to happen to your body weight given the calculated calorie deficit period. This is important because you will not stay in the calorie deficit forever, and you need to understand what will happen to your weight after things balance out again.

See Your Daily Weight Targets

Scrolling down a little reveals a detailed report with four tabs, the first of which is your weight chart. You will see that, according to The Food Stalker Calorie Deficit Calculator, your weight will experience a sharp rebound soon after you come off the calorie deficit upon reaching your goal weight, before plateauing and gradually returning to your goal weight. The shaded areas represent the range of potential body weight results (the range is large because human metabolism is complicated!).

Download for Printing and Reference

You can spend a great deal of time exploring the calorie deficit calculator’s output reports, especially if you re-run The Food Stalker’s Calorie Deficit Calculator with a few different targets and physical activity levels. Even better, you can download your reports as a spreadsheet (CSV format) for deep review and planning. You might even print your spreadsheet out and tick off your progress as you watch the body you want emerge into reality. Just click the “Export Charts Data” button to get the download.

More Information

The fine details of calorie deficit calculations can be overwhelming, but some people find it an endlessly fascinating area of study. If you are interested in learning more about how caloric intake affects your weight, a great place to start is listening in on Professor Andrew Huberman’s podcasts on the subject. This video is a great primer: