A 150-pound male typically needs between 2,200 and 2,800 calories per day to maintain his weight, depending on age, height, and how physically active he is. A sedentary 30-year-old at 5’10” lands around 2,550 calories, while someone the same size with a moderately active lifestyle needs closer to 2,900.
How Maintenance Calories Are Calculated
Your body burns calories in three ways: basic organ function at rest (called your basal metabolic rate or BMR), physical activity, and digesting food. BMR alone accounts for the largest share, typically 60 to 70 percent of your total daily burn. The most widely used formula for estimating BMR is the Mifflin-St Jeor equation, which factors in your weight, height, age, and sex.
For men, the formula works like this: multiply your weight in kilograms by 10, add your height in centimeters multiplied by 6.25, subtract your age in years multiplied by 5, then add 5. At 150 pounds (68.2 kg), 5’10” (177.8 cm), and 30 years old, that gives you a BMR of roughly 1,650 calories. That’s what your body would burn lying in bed all day doing absolutely nothing.
From there, you multiply by an activity factor to get your total daily energy expenditure. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations classifies these activity levels into three broad categories:
- Sedentary or light activity (1.4 to 1.7): desk job, minimal exercise, mostly sitting throughout the day
- Moderately active (1.7 to 2.0): regular exercise several times a week or a job that keeps you on your feet
- Vigorously active (2.0 to 2.4): intense daily training, physically demanding labor, or competitive athletics
Activity levels above 2.4 are difficult to sustain long-term even for elite athletes.
Calories by Activity Level at 150 Pounds
Using a 30-year-old male at 5’10” as a baseline, here’s what maintenance looks like across activity levels. These numbers use the midpoint of each activity range:
- Sedentary (multiplier of 1.55): roughly 2,550 calories per day
- Moderately active (multiplier of 1.75): roughly 2,880 calories per day
- Very active (multiplier of 2.2): roughly 3,630 calories per day
The gap between sedentary and very active is over 1,000 calories per day. That’s the equivalent of an entire extra meal. If you overestimate how active you are and eat accordingly, you’ll gain weight steadily over time.
How Age Changes the Number
Your metabolism slows as you age, largely because you lose muscle mass and your organs become slightly less metabolically active. The Mifflin-St Jeor equation subtracts 5 calories for every year of age, which means a decade costs you about 50 calories of daily BMR. That sounds small, but it compounds when multiplied by your activity factor.
For a sedentary 150-pound male at 5’10”, the difference looks like this:
- Age 25: approximately 2,590 calories
- Age 30: approximately 2,550 calories
- Age 40: approximately 2,480 calories
- Age 50: approximately 2,400 calories
Between 25 and 50, a sedentary man loses nearly 200 maintenance calories per day. If you’re eating the same way at 45 that you did at 25, that alone can account for roughly 20 pounds of weight gain over a few years.
How Height Affects the Estimate
At the same weight, a taller person burns more calories at rest. This is because a taller frame generally means longer bones, more organ tissue, and a larger surface area losing heat. For a 30-year-old sedentary male at 150 pounds, the height difference plays out like this:
- 5’6″: approximately 2,460 calories
- 5’10”: approximately 2,550 calories
- 6’0″: approximately 2,600 calories
The spread from 5’6″ to 6’0″ is about 140 calories per day. Not dramatic, but enough to matter over weeks and months. If you’re shorter, your maintenance number is on the lower end of the typical ranges you’ll see online.
What Your Body Burns Digesting Food
About 10 percent of the calories you eat get burned just processing that food. This is called the thermic effect of food, and it varies by what you eat. Protein costs the most energy to digest, burning 15 to 30 percent of its calories during processing. Carbohydrates burn 5 to 10 percent, and fats burn just 0 to 3 percent.
For a 150-pound male eating around 2,500 calories on a mixed diet, roughly 250 of those calories go toward digestion itself. This is already built into most calorie calculators, so you don’t need to add or subtract anything. But it does explain why higher-protein diets can nudge your effective maintenance calories slightly upward. If you swap some carbs for protein while keeping total calories the same, you’ll net fewer usable calories because more get burned during digestion.
Why Calculators Are Starting Points
Every formula gives you an estimate, not a measurement. Two 150-pound men of the same age and height can have meaningfully different metabolic rates based on muscle mass, genetics, sleep quality, stress hormones, and gut health. The Mifflin-St Jeor equation is considered the most accurate of the common formulas, but it still has an error margin of about 10 percent in either direction for any individual.
Food labels add another layer of imprecision. The FDA allows calorie counts on nutrition labels to vary by as much as 20 percent from the actual calorie content. A snack bar listed at 200 calories could contain anywhere from 160 to 240. When you combine formula error with label error, your daily tracking could be off by several hundred calories.
The practical solution is to use a calculator as your starting point, then track your weight for two to three weeks while eating consistently. If your weight stays stable, you’ve found your actual maintenance number. If you’re gaining, drop 100 to 200 calories and reassess. If you’re losing, add the same. Your scale over time is a more reliable calorie counter than any equation.