In natural ecosystems, available energy in food often fails to predict biomass production which is also (co)limited by the relative availability of various dietary compounds. Characterizing the link between energy metabolism and the effects of food chemical composition on biomass production thus constitutes a critical step towards better understanding how food quality may affect consumer energy balance and, subsequently, efficiency of energy transfer within food web. Here, we used microcalorimetric approaches to precisely monitor the resting metabolic rate (RMR) of Daphnia magna along ontogeny when undergoing various (non-energetic) nutritional constraints. All types of dietary (co)limitations (Fatty acids, Sterols, Phosphorus) induced an increase in mass-specific RMR up to 128% between highest and lowest quality diets. The strong negative correlation reported here between RMR and growth rate clearly highlight a reallocation of energy from growth to maintenance. The persistence of this correlation regardless of the nature of the nutritional constraints highlight the universality of a trade-off between growth and maintenance under deteriorated nutritional conditions. Ultimately, this energetic cost imposed by food quality on individual RMR may constitute a common metric facilitating the integration of nutritional and metabolic ecology to characterize energy flow within trophic structure.