Daily macro requirements: macro charts by weight for men and women

Below are macro charts by weight in pounds for men and women, the full 200 lb and 150 lb examples at every activity level, and the formula behind them, so you can find your own row in a few seconds.

The "2000 calorie" lie on every food label

You know that little line on the back of every cereal box and frozen pizza? "Based on a 2,000 calorie diet." That number exists so every label can work out its percentages from the same figure. It isn't anybody's actual requirement.

Take two 30-year-olds as an example. A 200 lb man, 5 ft 10, who trains 3-5 times a week burns about 2,905 calories a day by our calorie calculator. A 120 lb woman, 5 ft 5, with a desk job and no workouts burns about 1,517. That's almost double, and they're reading the same label.

One thing before the formulas: if you're not sure what weight you should even aim for, check your BMI first. It shows a healthy weight range for your height, and your weight goal decides whether you eat for a deficit, maintenance or a gain.

How to calculate your personal numbers

The Mifflin-St Jeor formula is your best bet here. When a systematic review in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association, 2005 compared the four equations everybody uses, Mifflin-St Jeor came out the most reliable — it landed within 10% of measured resting metabolic rate for more people than any of the others. The same review is honest about the catch: older adults and several ethnic groups were thin on the ground in the original studies, so the further you are from "average adult", the more you should trust your own scale over the formula.

Men: BMR = 10 times weight in kg + 6.25 times height in cm minus 5 times age plus 5

Women: BMR = 10 times weight in kg + 6.25 times height in cm minus 5 times age minus 161

The equation itself comes from Mifflin MD, St Jeor ST et al., American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 1990, derived from 498 healthy adults aged 19 to 78, both normal-weight and obese.

BMR is your basal metabolic rate — what your body burns just lying in bed doing absolutely nothing. To get your actual daily needs, multiply by an activity factor:

• Desk job, no exercise: times 1.2
• Light workouts 1-3 days: times 1.375
• Moderate training 3-5 days: times 1.55
• Hard training 6-7 days: times 1.725

That whole "resting burn times an activity factor" idea comes from the FAO/WHO/UNU report Human energy requirements, chapter 5, 2004, which defines physical activity level and describes lifestyle categories from sedentary to vigorous.

Daily macro chart by weight: men

Calories alone don't tell you what to put on the plate, so these charts go straight to grams. Find your weight, read across. Every number comes from the same engine that runs the calculator on this site.

Maintenance calories and macros. Man, 30, 178 cm (5 ft 10), light activity (×1.375). Protein 1.4 g per kg (light activity, 1-3 workouts a week, counts as training), fat 25% of calories, carbs the rest. Worked out with the macro calculator.

Daily macro chart by weight: women

Maintenance calories and macros. Woman, 30, 165 cm (5 ft 5), light activity (×1.375). Protein 1.4 g per kg (light activity, 1-3 workouts a week, counts as training), fat 25% of calories, carbs the rest. Worked out with the macro calculator.

Each extra 20 lb adds roughly 125 calories a day at light activity, spread across all three: about 13 g more protein, a few grams more fat and about 10 g more carbs. Train harder than "light"? Move down to the activity tables in the next two sections, or put your own numbers into the macro calculator. If you only want the calorie number by age and weight, without the gram split, that's in how many calories do I need a day.

How many calories does a 200 lb man need?

Between about 2,250 and 3,230 calories a day to hold his weight, depending on how much he moves, per our calorie calculator. Here's the full picture for a 30-year-old, 5 ft 10 man at 200 lb:

Man, 30, 200 lb (90.7 kg), 178 cm (5 ft 10). "Lose" is maintenance minus 500 kcal (no more than 20% of maintenance), about 1 lb a week at most; it never goes below 1500 kcal. Macros are for maintenance. Worked out with the macro calculator.

So how many calories should a 200 lb man eat to lose weight? Take his maintenance number and subtract about 500: roughly 2,080 with light exercise, 2,400 if he trains 3-5 days a week. If he sits all day, 500 would be more than 20% of his burn, so the calculator stops at 1,800. A 500-calorie daily deficit is about a pound a week, the ratio used in the NHLBI clinical guidelines, 1998 ("500 to 1,000 kcal/day" for "1 to 2 lb/week"). The 20% cap is our own cautious choice, not a rule from a study. Taller or shorter, older or younger: the gap from this table is usually a hundred or two calories, not a thousand.

One thing about protein. Notice it stays at 127 g from light activity up: that's 1.4 g per kg, the bottom of the 1.4-2.0 g per kg range the International Society of Sports Nutrition Position Stand, 2017 calls enough for most people who train. If he doesn't train at all, the calculator drops to 75 g, which is 0.83 g per kg, the adult requirement in the EFSA scientific opinion on protein, 2012. Extra calories from more activity go mostly into carbs.

How many calories does a 150 lb woman need?

Roughly 1,680 to 2,415 calories a day to maintain by the calorie calculator, again set mostly by activity. A 30-year-old, 5 ft 5 woman at 150 lb:

Woman, 30, 150 lb (68 kg), 165 cm (5 ft 5). "Lose" is maintenance minus 500 kcal (no more than 20% of maintenance), about 1 lb a week at most; it never goes below 1200 kcal. Macros are for maintenance. Worked out with the macro calculator.

Look at the sedentary and light rows: taking 500 off would cut more than 20% of her burn, so the calculator stops at 1,344 and 1,540. That's a little slower than a pound a week, and a lot easier to live with than eating 1,200 for months. The calculator also never goes below 1,200 calories for women and 1,500 for men, the upper ends of the low-calorie ranges in the same NHLBI guidelines (1,000-1,200 for women, 1,200-1,500 for men).

Is 200 grams of carbs a day a lot?

Depends whose day it is. In the charts above, a 130 lb woman at light activity gets 255 g of carbs at maintenance and a 200 lb man gets 355 g, so for both of them 200 g would already be a cut. The US Institute of Medicine's Dietary Reference Intakes, 2005 put the floor for adults at 130 g of carbs a day and the healthy range at 45-65% of calories. There's no universal "too much": the number only means something next to your weight and how much you move.

Breaking it down into macros

Okay, so you've got your calorie number. Now, where should those calories come from? This is the macro split, and it's simpler than people make it. Here's the order our calculator works in.

Protein is set in grams per kilo of body weight, because that's how the research gives it. Not training and holding your weight: 0.83 g per kg, the EFSA adult requirement linked above. Training (for us that starts at light activity, 1-3 workouts a week): somewhere in the ISSN range of 1.4-2.0 g per kg. Inside that range the calculator uses 1.4 for maintenance, 1.6 for a gain, 1.8 for a cut and 2.0 for recomposition, which is our own pick. Cutting without training: 1.2 g per kg, the low end of the 1.2-1.6 range in Leidy HJ et al., American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 2015. How many grams that means at your weight and goal: how much protein you need per day.

Fat: 25% of calories. That sits in the middle of the 20-35% range from the Institute of Medicine and under the 30% ceiling in the WHO fact sheet on healthy diet, checked 19.10.2026. Which fats matter too: the same WHO fact sheet says to keep saturated fat under 10% of daily energy and trans fat under 1%, and to limit free sugars.

Here's what that looks like in actual grams, by goal, for a 176 lb man who trains 3-5 times a week (the women's version of this table, for a sedentary woman, is in macros for weight loss):

Man, 30, 80 kg, 178 cm, moderate activity (×1.55), so protein is set for someone who trains: 1.8 / 1.4 / 1.6 / 2.0 g/kg. Worked out with the macro calculator.

Look at the pattern: calories drop for weight loss, but protein goes up, from 1.4 to 1.8 g per kg, because ISSN notes that people who train may need more protein in a deficit. What gets cut is carbs. How that split gets built for a cut, and which floors not to go under, is here: macros for weight loss. Your own version of this table is one click away in the macro calculator.

Why formulas are just the starting point

Here's what nobody tells you. Two people with the exact same height, weight, age, and activity level can still burn noticeably different amounts. The formula only knows sex, weight, height and age; it can't see body composition, hormones or sleep. Even Mifflin-St Jeor, the most reliable of the four equations in that 2005 review, doesn't land within 10% for everyone.

So the formula gives you your starting point. Eat at that level for two weeks. Weigh yourself every morning, calculate the weekly average. Weight stable? Your calculation was spot on. Going up? Cut back a little. Dropping too fast? Add some back. A daily and weekly template for logging food and weight is in how to keep a food diary.

Here's how that plays out in an example. Say the calculator gives you 2,200 on a cut, and after two weeks the weekly average has barely moved. You drop to 2,050, check again in two weeks, and keep the number that works. How big each step should be isn't something studies pin down; small steps are just common practice.

When to recalculate

Three moments when your old number stops being true.

Your activity changed. New job, joined or quit the gym, two weeks on holiday. That's a whole activity factor, not a rounding error.

Years went by. This one is slow — the formula takes off 5 calories per year of age, 50 per decade. Less than the noise of a single day, but it adds up across twenty years.

How to not lose your mind over numbers

You don't need to weigh rice on a kitchen scale, agonize over whether a chicken breast was 5 or 6 ounces, or log every crumb like it's your job.

Seriously. Rough accuracy beats perfect obsession every time.

Know your target. Stay in the ballpark. Went over today? Eat a little lighter tomorrow. No drama. No guilt. It averages out over the week.

The most useful thing is simply logging what you eat, and you don't need a kitchen scale to do it — how to count calories without one. With the CalCash bot you just say "had an omelet with tomatoes and toast" and see the numbers. After a week of doing this, you learn your own diet better than you would from a month of reading articles about daily macro requirements.

That's the real win. Not perfect calculations. Just awareness.