Diet Break Calculator

Stripped of the jargon, a diet break is just a planned pause from your deficit spent eating at maintenance — the number of calories that holds your weight steady. With the goal here set to maintain, the calculator estimates that maintenance figure and uses it as the weekly average, so the schedule it lays out is the break itself: the calories that, repeated across the week, keep you roughly level. Some people prefer to eat the same maintenance number every day; others like to cycle gently around it, a little more on training days and a little less on rest days, which still averages back to maintenance. There is nothing to optimise here beyond hitting the weekly average — a break works precisely because it is undramatic. When the week or two is up, the deficit resumes from the same maintenance figure.

A break only does its job if it is bounded. Decide the length up front — most people take one to two weeks — eat at the maintenance figure this page gives you, and then go back to losing. Because you return to the same maintenance number, setting the deficit again is straightforward: the Calorie Deficit Calculator subtracts the cut, and the TDEE Calculator confirms the maintenance figure the break sits at. If you are not pausing a diet but ending one for good, ramping calories up week by week suits better than a single jump — that is what the Reverse Dieting Calculator plans.

Even at maintenance, protein is worth holding steady — it supports recovery and makes the extra calories of the break more likely to do good than harm. Let the rise from deficit to maintenance come mostly from carbohydrate and a little more fat. To split your maintenance-day total into grams, run the Macro Calculator, or build a gentle cycle around maintenance with the Zigzag Calorie Calculator. These are general estimates for healthy adults, not medical advice.