How many calories should I be burning in a day? (NOT WEIGHT LOSS)

[Dei-hime]

Every time I try to research it, all I get is "how many calories to burn if you want to lose weight."

Not what I want. No. Nuh-uh. Go away.

The rest of the time, all I find is how many calories I should be eating (given weight, height, age, daily exercise load). Still not helpful.

My question is, does anyone know or have resources I can follow up on regarding how many calories one ought to expect to burn in a day (how many calories it is normal to burn), given whatever necessary parameters? (e.g. if one is x age, y lbs/kgs, z height, and does light exercise daily, how many calories is it normal to be burning in a day/over a week.)

My fitness trackers are predicting that I'm burning what looks to me like a lot of calories without hardly even doing anything (it's complicated, but suffice to say there are health/medication reasons why this is possible). But since I have no metric against which to compare these values, I have no idea whether these values are in fact normal--or if not after all, just how not normal the values are.

Thanks in advance for any assistance.

[Dominique]

There is no universal rule that says person A should burn X calories per day. It all depends on their goal(s), in terms of weight management, overall health, fitness etc.

Energy expenditure reported by an activity tracker (e.g. your Fitbit) is an estimate. You can double-check the numbers using an online calculator such as this one. It comes with five standardized activity levels, ranging from sedentary to extremely active.

So what are your goal(s)? Is it to maintain your current weight, to improve your health, to increase your cardiovascular capacity, to become stronger etc.?

[willwbowen]

Google TDEE calculator. This lets you enter your bio info and exercise intensity, then tells you what you are expected to burn on an average day