This planner takes your daily calorie target and divides it across your meals, telling you how many calories to aim for at breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks. It is useful for hitting a cutting or bulking target, structuring an intermittent-fasting day, or simply avoiding an over-large dinner. Pick a ready-made split or set your own percentages.
How it works
You enter a total daily calorie figure, then choose a split. Each meal carries a percentage, and the planner multiplies your total by that percentage to get the per-meal calories. The built-in presets are:
| Split | Distribution |
|---|---|
| Even 3 meals | Breakfast 33.3% · Lunch 33.3% · Dinner 33.4% |
| Even 4 (with snack) | 25% each across 4 |
| 16:8 fasting | Lunch 40% · Dinner 40% · Evening snack 20% |
| Custom | Your own percentages |
In custom mode you set each meal’s share directly; for accurate results the percentages should total 100%.
Example
With a 2,000 kcal target on the even 3-meal plan:
- Breakfast: 2,000 × 0.333 ≈ 666 kcal
- Lunch: 2,000 × 0.333 ≈ 666 kcal
- Dinner: 2,000 × 0.334 ≈ 668 kcal
Switch to the 16:8 plan and the same 2,000 kcal becomes 800 at lunch, 800 at dinner and 400 as an evening snack, with breakfast skipped.
Everything is calculated in your browser — nothing is uploaded.
Practical tips for hitting your meal targets
Protein anchors each meal. Distributing calories evenly is straightforward, but the most useful approach is to decide protein first — roughly 25–40 g per meal — and then fill the remaining calories with carbohydrates and fat. This keeps you full, preserves muscle on a cut, and avoids the common mistake of front-loading carbs and running low on protein by evening.
Larger meals before activity, smaller meals after. If you train in the morning or at lunch, slightly increasing those pre-workout meals and reducing dinner helps fuel performance without creating a large calorie surplus before sleep. Use custom mode and shift 5–10 percentage points toward whichever meal precedes your workout.
Snack placement matters for adherence. On a 4-meal plan, placing the snack mid-afternoon (around 3–4 pm) helps most people avoid over-eating at dinner. On a 16:8 fasting window, an evening snack works better because the long overnight fast begins right after.
The calorie-dense mistake to avoid. Many people drastically undereat at breakfast and lunch, then consume 60–70% of their calories at dinner. This makes it hard to hit protein targets, leads to evening hunger and snacking beyond the plan, and often makes sleep worse. Even a modest 25% breakfast helps keep daily intake steady.
Reading the output
The planner shows calories per meal as whole numbers. In practice, food portions rarely hit an exact calorie figure, so treat the output as a target range ±50 kcal rather than a precise number. If you are using a food-tracking app, log meals throughout the day and check you are roughly on track before dinner — adjust the final meal to hit the daily total rather than rigidly hitting every meal number.
Custom mode tip: if your percentages do not add to 100%, the per-meal calories will not sum to your daily target. The planner flags this. The simplest fix is to assign one meal (usually dinner) whatever percentage remains after setting the others.