Refeed Day Calculator
Work out your refeed day calories — the planned high day of a cycling cut, set near your maintenance — with a 7-day schedule that keeps the weekly deficit intact.
Zigzag Calorie Calculator
Sets your weekly average: a calorie cut to lose (you choose the size below), maintenance to hold, or a 300 kcal/day surplus to gain.
A smaller deficit loses slower but is easier to sustain and better protects muscle — pick a gentler cut if you are already lean or training hard.
Used to estimate your maintenance calories — the energy you burn in a day — with the Mifflin-St Jeor equation, a standard peer-reviewed formula.
Range: 15–100 years
Range: 30–300 kg
Enter your height in centimeters (e.g., 170 cm)
Range: 100–250 cm
The schedule puts your highest day here — line it up with your hardest training or a social meal, and the rest of the week rotates to match. The weekly average doesn't change.
Already know your maintenance (TDEE)? Enter it to skip the estimate — height and age aren't needed then. Don't know it? Find it with the TDEE Calculator.
*This calculator is for informational purposes only. Please consult a healthcare professional before making any health decisions. See our medical disclaimer for more information.
Quick Answer
What Are Your Refeed Day Calories?
A refeed day is a planned higher-calorie day inside a cut, usually set at or near your maintenance calories. This calculator estimates that maintenance figure from your stats and builds a 7-day cycling cut around it — the high day is your refeed, the low days carry the deficit, and the week still averages to your target. Enter your details above to see both numbers.
A Refeed Is the High Day of a Cycle
The simplest way to place a refeed is to stop treating it as a separate event and read it as the high day of a calorie-cycling week. When you set a goal to lose, this calculator works out your maintenance, subtracts a deficit to get a weekly average, then spreads that average across seven days — two a little higher, two a little lower, one on the line. The highest of those days, about fifteen per cent above the average, is your refeed in everything but name: it is the day you eat more, fuelled mostly by carbohydrate, while the rest of the week stays in deficit. Because the high and low days are built to average back to your target, the refeed sits inside the week rather than on top of it, so the weekly deficit is untouched. If you want the refeed to land right at maintenance on a hard training day, the result shows you that ceiling.
Where to Put the Refeed
Put the refeed where the food does the most work: your hardest training day, or the day you most want the social room to eat. Keep the lowest days on rest days, and avoid stacking two low days back to back so no single stretch is too lean. The day labels in the schedule are only a template — move them freely, as long as you keep the same count of high, low and baseline days so the weekly average holds. If you are coming off a longer diet rather than running a steady cut, ramping calories back up week by week may suit you better than a single refeed; the Reverse Dieting Calculator plans that, and the TDEE Calculator confirms the maintenance figure your refeed aims for.
Make the Refeed Mostly Carbohydrate
On the higher day the extra calories are best spent on carbohydrate, which refills the glycogen a hard training week draws down and tends to make the next sessions feel better. Hold protein steady across the whole week, the low days included, so muscle is protected while the deficit days do their work. To turn your refeed-day total into grams of protein, carbohydrate and fat, run the Macro Calculator on that number, or build the full week from your own stats on the Zigzag Calorie Calculator. These are general estimates for healthy adults, not medical advice.
Maintenance is estimated with the Mifflin-St Jeor equation (1990). The 7-day pattern uses multipliers that sum to exactly 7, so a refeed high day sits inside the weekly average rather than adding to it. Cycling does not change your weekly calorie total or your weekly deficit. Individual needs vary.
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