How to Use this Carb Calculator

To get your customized carb goal, just enter your details into the form above. Here’s how to do it:

Start by choosing your gender and inputting your age. Then select your height and current body weight.

Next up is your weekly workout schedule - starting with any strength or resistance training. Tell us how often you strength train and for how long, along with the level of intensity: light activity, moderate activity, heavy activity, or athlete.

Follow this up with your weekly cardio or conditioning routine, repeating the same steps.

From there, you’ll select your nutrition goal: lose weight, gain muscle, or maintain weight.

Then our proprietary formula will calculate your personal daily carb requirements based on your personal health and fitness information and email you the results.

How Your Carb Needs Are Calculated

The exact amount of carbohydrates your body needs is directly related to how active you are and your fitness goals - typically the more you exercise, the more carbs your body needs to fuel it. Of course, this is not as simplistic as it sounds and can vary from one person to the next. 

Many individuals are able to maintain a high level of physical activity on a high-fat low carb diet plan. The type of exercise you engage in, the intensity level, and how metabolically efficient you are can all play a role in your total carb needs. 

To help get you the most accurate carb recommendation, our calculator will first assess your total calorie demands. This is because the number of calories you eat every day is the single most important factor when it comes to achieving your goals of weight loss, muscle gain, or weight maintenance. 

From there, your protein and fat goals are estimated based on your body weight and fitness routine. This is because both fat and protein are essential for good health, while carbs are not, making them more of a priority when it comes to your daily energy intake. 

High protein intake is typically recommended for a goal of muscle gain or weight loss because of the beneficial role it plays in supporting a healthy body fat percentage. And for fat, a typical range of 20% to 40% of your calories is suggested to maintain good health.

Because fat provides roughly nine calories per gram and carbs and protein provide about four calories per gram, once your protein and fat goals are known your carb goals are calculated based on your remaining daily calories. 

This ensures that your body gets the nutrition you need first and optimizes your carbohydrate consumption to support your activity level.

Learn more about how many carbs a day you should be eating for weight loss. 

Calculating Carbs for a Keto Diet

If you’re following a ketogenic diet, this calculator won’t work for you.

To figure out your daily net carb needs to get into and stay in ketosis, check out our keto macro calculator!