Macro calculator

Your daily calories and protein, with carbs and fat left where they land. Pick a specific split if you want one, but two numbers to hit beats four, and most people do better with fewer.

Milo

Your macros will appear here.

How this is worked out

Keep it simple is the default, and it’s the one to take if you’re starting out. You get a calorie target and a protein floor, and nothing else. Carbs and fat fall wherever your meals happen to put them, because chasing four numbers is how people last three weeks and then stop.

Of the two, calories decide whether you lose weight. Protein is what keeps the loss coming from fat rather than muscle, so treat it as a floor to clear, not a figure to land on exactly.

Calories come first: maintenance from the Mifflin-St Jeor equation and your activity level, then a percentage adjustment for your goal rather than a flat number, because a 500-calorie cut means something very different at 1,800 than at 3,200.

Protein is set from estimated lean mass and rises as the deficit deepens, from about 2.0g per kg of lean mass at maintenance to 2.6g on an aggressive cut. That’s the one macro with a floor worth defending.

Choose one of the specific splits and fat and carbs fill the remaining calories: balanced puts fat at about 25% of calories and gives the rest to carbs, while low carb and keto invert that. Worth doing if you already know a particular way of eating suits your appetite. Not worth doing on your first month.

Worth knowing before you agonise over the choice: the DIETFITS trial put low-fat against low-carb for a year with 600 people and found no meaningful difference in weight lost. Calories and protein did the work. Pick the split you’ll actually stick to.

The number is the easy part

Any calculator can hand you a figure. The hard bit is the next three months: eating roughly to it, noticing when it stops working, and changing it. Milo is a coach you text like a friend. You log what you ate in a sentence, and it learns your patterns, notices when your weight stalls, and adjusts the target from what you actually did rather than from a formula.

See how Milo works

Common questions

Which split should I choose?

None, to start with. Take the simple option and track calories and protein. The evidence that the carb-to-fat ratio changes fat loss is weak once calories and protein are matched, so a specific split adds two more things to get wrong in exchange for very little. Pick one later if you find a particular way of eating keeps you fuller.

Isn't tracking only two numbers less accurate?

Less precise, more accurate in practice, because it’s the version people actually keep doing. A calorie target you hit five days out of seven beats a four-macro plan you abandon in a fortnight. This is exactly what Milo does in chat: it tracks calories and protein by default, and only scores carbs and fat if you ask it to.

Why is my protein target higher than other calculators?

Most multiply your bodyweight. This works from lean mass, then scales with how hard you’re dieting, since protein is what protects muscle in a deficit. For someone carrying more fat the two approaches can differ by 40 grams or more.

What about fibre and sugar?

Not macros in the calorie sense, but fibre is worth a target of its own: 25-30g a day helps with fullness, which makes a deficit easier to hold. Sugar isn’t a separate problem so much as a fast way to spend calories without feeling full.

Other calculators

These are estimates from population averages, not measurements of you. Individual metabolism varies by roughly ±10% around any formula. Nothing here is medical advice — if you have a health condition, are pregnant, or are under 18, talk to a healthcare professional before changing how you eat or train.