Eating the same calories daily is great for building a habit, but planning high and low calorie days is a great step up. Eating different calories each day helps break weight loss plateaus, energize your workouts, and creates a more flexible lifestyle. Just follow the steps below to find out how to effectively create different calorie goals for weight loss or muscle gain.
If you have trouble consistently tracking your food every day, it’s better to start with eating the same calories every day. Eating different calories provides great results, but is more difficult to learn. However, if you’ve been tracking for months or years, this will be a great way to get better results.
Benefits of Different Daily Calories
Break Weight Loss Plateaus
When most people diet, they see great results for the first few weeks, but then suddenly the progress stops dead in its tracks. This is mostly because of metabolic adaptation. Metabolic adaptation is when the body slows down it’s normal calorie burn to match how many calories you’re eating. For example, if you’re body burns 2,000 calories a day, and you eat 1,500 calories to lose weight, you can see about a pound of weight loss a week. However, eventually the body will slow down and only burn 1,500 calories to match what you eat. The only way to progress after that is to eat less or move more, but the best approach is to avoid metabolic adaptation for as long as possible.
Eating different calories every day helps to avoid metabolic adaptation because the higher calorie days help keep the metabolism boosted.
More Effective Workouts
Working out on low calories will never feel as good as high calories. With higher calories, you’ll have more glycogen storage to provide as much output as possible during your exercises. Again, higher calorie days help fix this if they’re used during your workout days.
Flexible Lifestyle
If you think of your normal day-to-day life, you’ll notice you’re never eating the same calories every single day. Sure you may have the same things during the weekdays, but on the weekend you’re more likely to eat out for social gatherings. This can cause a lot of anxiety if you eat the same calories every day; you have to be much more careful about what you eat so you don’t get too many calories. However, if you plan for the weekends to be your higher calorie days, you’ll have much more freedom to eat what you want without denting your goals.
It’s important to know that planning a higher calorie day is NOT the same as a cheat day. A cheat day implies you can eat absolutely anything you want with no limits, which will ruin your goals no matter what. A planned higher calorie day simply means you can eat more, but you still have to stay within the limits of the diet.
Below is a simple guide on how to create different calorie target to achieve these benefits.
How to Track Different Calories Every Day
When using different daily calories, you want to make sure that your total calorie intake by the end of the week still lines up with your goals. If you’re trying to lose weight, your weekly calorie intake should be well below your weekly calorie burn. For gaining weight, you should eating above that number.
The first step to accurately tracking different calories is to find out your weekly calorie burn. After that, you can plan a different target for each day of the week.
1) Find Out Your TDEE and Weekly Calorie Burn
TDEE, or total daily energy expenditure, is an estimation of how many calories you burn each day. There are a variety of ways to estimate this, but the easiest way is to use a calorie calculator online. This calculator from ACTIVE.com only needs a few metrics like height, weight, activity level, etc. to estimate how many calories your body needs every day to maintain your weight.
Next, add or subtract up to 500 hundred calories from this number depending on your weight goal. Here’s a chart describing each goal and what to do:
| Goal | TDEE Adjustment |
| Fast Weight Loss | TDEE – 500 |
| Slow Weight Loss | TDEE – 200 |
| Body Recomposition (Build muscle and lose fat) | TDEE – 0 (no change) |
| Slow Weight Gain | TDEE + 200 |
| Fast Weight Gain | TDEE + 500 |
Notice there’s “slow and fast” for weight loss and weight gain. Here’s the difference between the two:
| Goal | Pro | Con |
| Fast Weight Loss | Fast Progress | Harder to maintain since hunger and craving will be very strong |
| Slow Weight Loss | Easier to maintain because less hunger and cravings | Slow progress |
| Fast Weight Gain | Fast Progress | Likely to gain bodyfat |
| Slow Weight Gain | Unlikely to gain bodyfat | Slow progress |
If you’re a beginner, go with the slow approach (add or subtract 200 from your TDEE). Going fast might sound exciting, but as the hunger gets more and more unbearable, you’re much more likely to fall off the wagon and quit the diet entirely
Lastly, now that you have your target calorie intake for each day, multiply that number by 7 to get your weekly calorie target. This will help you set up different calorie goals throughout the week in the next step.
2) Distribute Your Daily Calories
With your weekly calorie goal on hand, you can now distribute a different calorie goal for each day of the week. Think of your weekly calorie goal like a budget, and each day of the week needs a different “spending limit.” The easiest way to distribute calories is by having high and low calorie days. How many calories are low and how many are high depends on your activity level, so use the following tips to help decide.
Put more calories on workout days: Putting more calories on your most active days ensures that those calories won’t just add bodyfat. Instead, your body will have a reason to directly use those calories. This will also boost your workout energy to get a much stronger output.
Have at least two days in a row of high calories: According to Dr. Layne Norton in his book Fat Loss Forever, having at least two high calorie days in a row creates a “refeed window.” Similar to the previous tip, this means your body gets a slight metabolism boost after spending most of the week with low calories. The slowing down of the metabolism (metabolic adaptation) is one of the biggest downsides to eating the same calories every day.
High calorie days can’t be double of low calorie days: Having high calorie days that are double or more of your low calorie days will be too extreme for the body to handle properly. Even if you’re extremely active on those days, it’ll be hard for the body not to store all those extra calories as bodyfat.
Don’t go overboard on high calorie days: Although you’re going to have more freedom, don’t blow all of your calories on processed foods. Try to stick to whole natural foods to get the most micronational benefit you can. To learn more about the health difference between whole and processed foods, read our article here.
Example of Using Different Calories
Finding your calorie targets
To better understand the process, here’s an example of someone going through the same process. Let’s say we have a 160lb female trying to lose weight slowly. She’s 5’4″, 25 years old, and exercises 4 days a week.
Using the ACTIVE calculator, her daily calorie burn is estimated to about 2,500 calories a day (rounded to the nearest hundred). Since she wants to lose weight slowly. she needs to subtract 200 calories from this to get a calorie goal of 2,300 a day. This makes her weekly calorie target 16,100 (which is 2,300 x 7).
Distributing Calories
Let’s say she works out Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday, and Sunday. The best time for her to have high calorie days is the weekend since she works out both days, and it’ll give her two days in a row of high calories. On top of this, she normally goes out to eat with friends on weekends, so this let’s her stay flexible with her normal life. She just has to make sure to make the right choices when eating out since the nutrition facts that restaurants post are never 100% accurate.
She decides to make her high calorie days 3,200 calories, so a total of 6,400 for those two days. This leaves 9,700 calories for the rest of her week. To make all of her low calorie days the same, she just needs to divide 9,700 by 5 to get 1,940 for her weekdays. This is a good high-low distribution because the high calorie days give a lot of freedom, and the low calorie days aren’t super restrictive.
Summary
In summary, she has 2 high calorie days at 3,200 calories and 5 low calorie days at 1,940 calories. Although this is the simplest way to get different calories, she still has the flexibility to make each day slightly different. For example, if she accidently gets 2,200 calories on a low calorie day, she can make up for it by getting about 1,700 the next day. Since the 200 difference gets canceled out, her weekly calorie goal remains the same.