How many calories should you consume at each meal to maintain your weight?

How many calories should you consume at each meal?
The calories each person needs to consume per day varies from person to person and will depend on factors such as diet type and daily activity level: logically, you don’t need the same amount of energy to face a professional athlete every day as a 50-year-old man who works eight hours in an office.

One way to calculate how many calories you need to consume at each meal is to calculate the total number of calories you consume each day and then divide them by the number of meals you prepare. In general, the calorie requirements of an adult woman of average weight who performs moderate activity throughout the day range from 1,800 to 2,200 calories per day, while a man with the same parameters will need 2,200 to 3,000 calories.

Using these calculations, we can find out how many calories to consume at each meal: women should eat between 600 and 733 calories per meal (if they eat three times a day), and men between 733 and 1000. You may want to eat more for lunch or dinner, but if you have diabetes and are trying to control your blood glucose levels, it is better to spread your meals evenly.

In any case, these amounts may increase or decrease depending on your personal circumstances: your type of work (physical or sedentary), sports activities, your schedule, etc.

Set a daily calorie goal for each meal.
Most people will lose weight by following a 1,500-calorie diet. To find out how many calories you need each day to maintain your current weight, you simply need to calculate your daily calorie requirements and not exceed this amount in the total amount of all the meals you prepare.

At this point, we may wonder how much the number of calories we consume in each meal affects us. The answer is simple: a lot. If you only eat three times a day, your body will go into starvation mode and release ghrelin, which will make you hungrier, take longer to feel satisfied, and require you to eat more than the number of calories you have in each meal.

The same applies to the number of calories we are going to consume depending on the type of activity we are going to do: it makes more sense to eat more food for breakfast to have energy to consume during the day, while at night – when we are only going to sleep and not move – we do not need to eat as much. So, the ideal thing is to eat 5 meals a day and consume more calories in the morning.

Sample menu with calories consumed at each meal
Let’s take as an example a woman weighing 72 kilograms, 1.65 metres tall, 32 years old, who leads a sedentary lifestyle. If we calculate her daily calorie requirement, we see that she needs 1,716.3 calories per day to maintain her weight.

1,716/5 = 343 calories per meal

Since 343 calories is not enough for a meal and too much for a snack, the ideal option would be to keep the snacks at 100 calories each and add the remaining calories to other dishes to make them more filling, so that we have 2 snacks of 100 calories each, 3 meals of 343 calories and 486 calories left to distribute.

Breakfast
1 cup of coffee with skim milk = 94 calories
2 slices of whole wheat bread (50 g) = 138 calories
2 slices of ham = 96 calories
1 teaspoon of olive oil = 45 kcal
Total = 373 calories

Snack
1 medium banana = 105 calories

Lunch
Chicken salad with vegetables and avocado = 470 kcal
1 ounce (20 grams) of dark chocolate 70% cocoa = 96 kcal
Total = 566 calories

Afternoon snack
Apple (52 kcal) and 0% fat yoghurt (45 kcal)
Total = 97 calories

Dinner
Scrambled eggs with mushrooms, asparagus and young garlic = 477 calories
1 slice of cheese = 98 calories
Total = 575 calories

Total per day = 1,716 calories

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