After you entered all of your data and calculated your macros, you will get results that look something like this:

Let’s start with the calories. Simply put, a calorie is a basic unit of energy that helps us understand how much energy we can potentially get from the food we eat. Calorie intake is one of the most critical variables to be aware of when you are trying to change your body composition.

If you eat fewer calories than you need to maintain your weight (which is also known as a calorie deficit) then you will lose weight. Conversely, eating more calories than you need to maintain your weight (which is also known as a calorie surplus) will cause you to gain weight.

Notice that I am saying “weight” loss and “weight” gain rather than “fat” loss and gain. By manipulating your calorie consumption, you will predictably change the numbers on the scale, but whether or not those numbers reflect a strong bias toward fat loss depends on the other numbers from your keto macro calculator results.

Fat, muscle, and water can all be lost and gained during the course of your diet. The proportion of weight you lose as fat, muscle, and water depends heavily upon the macronutrient content of your diet (i.e., how much fat, protein, and carbohydrates you eat). If you’d like to learn more about the macronutrients, check out our guide to macros.

Depending on the info that you enter into our keto calculator, you will get different ratios of fat, protein, and carbs. In general, carbs should remain low because they will prevent you from entering into ketosis and getting all of the benefits of the keto diet. By limiting carb consumption to this degree, many people will lose a considerable amount of water weight as well.

Protein is essential for maintaining and gaining muscle mass. Eating less protein than recommended by our keto calculator will typically cause you to lose more muscle mass while eating the right amount of protein will help you maintain or gain muscle mass (as long as you are doing some form of resistance training as well).

While you are restricting carbs, your fat intake will be used as a lever to increase and decrease calorie consumption so that you can gain, maintain, or lose weight. If you are eating the right protein along with the right amount of calories and fat, then the percentage of the weight you lose from fat will increase.

To find out how many calories of each macronutrient you should eat, make sure you convert the macro numbers that you get from our keto calculator to calories first. Here are the conversions for each macronutrient to make it easier for you: