How Many Calories Should I Burn a Day?

The guidelines I’m using count minutes and give no daily burn figure. For a 70 kg adult, 150 minutes of brisk walking a week uses about 95 kcal a day beyond what the body spends at rest. The CDC asks adults for 150 minutes of moderate activity a week, plus muscle-strengthening on at least 2 days.

Do the guidelines give a daily calorie target for exercise?

No. The CDC’s example of moderate activity is brisk walking, and the NHS says the same 150 minutes can be broken into shorter sessions. Neither page names a calorie figure, and a calorie figure would fit one body only, since the same walk costs a small person less than a large one.

Take a half-hour of ordinary walking at 3 mph. It uses 77 kcal beyond rest at 55 kg and 126 kcal at 90 kg, by the sums in the next section. A fixed number of calories would ask the lighter person for more time.

For the next seven days I’d count only the minutes you spend moving on purpose and skip the calorie readout on the treadmill.

How many calories does 150 minutes of activity use?

It depends on the activity and your weight. I used METs from the 2024 Compendium of Physical Activities. One MET is about 1 kcal per kg per hour, and the energy a session adds on top of resting is (MET - 1) × kg × hours. I left the resting part out because your body spends it whether you exercise or not.

Activity, 30 minutes	METs	55 kg	70 kg	90 kg
Walking, 3 mph	3.8	77	98	126
Walking, brisk, 3.5 to 3.9 mph	4.8	105	133	171
Cycling, leisure, 10 to 11.9 mph, light effort	6.8	160	203	261
Weights, 8 to 15 reps, several exercises	3.5	69	88	113
Running, 10 minutes a mile	9.3	228	291	374
Yoga, Hatha	2.3	36	46	59

Values in kcal beyond rest. A MET value is an average for a group of people, so your own cost differs.

Take five half-hour brisk walks. They make 523 kcal a week at 55 kg, 665 kcal at 70 kg and 855 kcal at 90 kg, which is 75, 95 and 122 kcal a day. At 70 kg, the same five sessions as a 10-minute-mile run make 1,453 kcal, or 208 kcal a day. Weights come out low, and that is fine, because the CDC asks for them for muscle, not for calories. How many calories weight lifting burns has the full breakdown.

To see what your own steps add, use the steps to calories calculator. It uses the same Compendium METs.

How many calories should I burn a day to lose weight?

Less than most people expect, because food does most of the work. The NHS says to aim to lose 0.5 to 1 kg a week, which is 1 to 2 lb. A gap of 7,700 kcal is the usual price of 1 kg. That is the 3,500-per-pound rule, which Hall’s 2008 analysis found fits people with a lot of body fat and overstates the gap for leaner people. So 0.5 kg a week needs about 3,850 kcal, or 550 kcal a day.

Set that against the table. Five brisk 30-minute walks at 70 kg cover 665 of the 3,850 kcal, which is 17%. At 90 kg the walks cover 855 kcal, or 22%. Most of the gap has to come from what you eat, and walking is the smaller partner. The rest of the day’s burn, resting metabolism included, is in how many calories you burn a day. Your cycle nudges it too, and whether you burn more calories on your period has a short answer.

By the same rule those walks are worth about 0.09 kg a week, or 1 kg in 12 weeks, and only if your eating stays put.

Exercise trials point the same way. A systematic review of them found that the weight lost was small mainly because the exercise doses were low, and people also ate more. I take that as a reason to set the gap with food first and treat activity as a bonus.

If you want a deficit set for you, the calorie calculator works out a starting goal and will not set one below the safe floor.

Should I eat back the calories my watch says I burned?

I wouldn’t trust a single reading, and I wouldn’t add all of it to a food goal. A Stanford team compared seven wrist-worn devices with a lab method in 60 volunteers. The median error in energy ranged from 27.4% to 92.6%, and no device came in under 20%.

Put numbers on it. A watch that reports 400 kcal for a workout, with the 27.4% error of the lowest-error device in that test, can be off by about 110 kcal. Half of the reading is 200 kcal, which covers that error with room to spare. My rule is to add half of a watch’s active energy at most, and none on days when I’m not sure what it measured. A workout earns no credit at dinner. If you track steps on a phone instead, walking apps for weight loss covers what a step count can and can’t tell you.

When is burning calories not the point?

Most of the time. Activity is worth doing for the guideline minutes, and weights count toward the 2 strengthening days whatever they cost in calories. Incidental movement counts as well, but I wouldn’t plan a day around how many calories sex burns. If you have a heart or joint condition, or something hurts when you move, ask your doctor before raising your activity.

I’d avoid any plan that has you exercise to cancel out a meal. I treat eating and moving as two separate habits, because once a workout becomes payment for a meal, skipping the workout feels like owing money. I’d choose a number of minutes that survives a bad week, and write that number down.

If counting calories has started to feel hard to stop, or eating feels out of control, talk to someone: ANAD in the US (1-888-375-7767), Beat in England (0808 801 0677), NEDIC in Canada (1-866-633-4220) or the Butterfly Foundation in Australia (1800 33 4673). If you’re in danger right now, call your local emergency number. Other UK numbers and crisis lines are on our crisis support page.