How Many Calories Should I Eat to Lose Weight?

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Start with your maintenance calories

Before you can run a deficit, you need to know what “break-even” looks like for your body. That number is your Total Daily Energy Expenditure (TDEE) — the calories you burn across a full day including rest, movement, exercise, and digestion.

Maintenance is not a universal number. It varies by bodyweight, muscle mass, age, sex, and how much you actually move. A 5’4” sedentary woman might maintain on 1,700 calories. A 6’1” man with an active job might need 3,000. Using your personal TDEE — not a generic guideline — is the starting point that makes everything else work.

The FindTDEE calculator estimates your TDEE from four validated BMR formulas and a MET-based activity score, giving you a tighter number than the standard “sedentary/active” buckets most tools use.

The deficit math

Fat loss follows a straightforward rule: eat less than you burn and your body turns to stored fat to make up the difference. One pound of body fat holds roughly 3,500 calories of stored energy. That gives us the standard working math:

• 250 kcal/day deficit → ~1,750 kcal deficit per week → roughly 0.5 lb of fat per week.
• 500 kcal/day deficit → ~3,500 kcal deficit per week → roughly 1 lb of fat per week.

Treat those figures as estimates. The body is not a closed furnace. Water shifts, hormonal changes, and small variations in activity mean the scale rarely moves in a straight line. Use weekly weight averages — not daily readings — to judge whether you’re on track, and give any new target at least two to three weeks before drawing conclusions.

Choosing the right deficit size

Knowing the math is one thing. Picking a number you can actually live with is another. Several factors should steer your choice:

• How much fat you have to lose. If you are significantly above your goal weight, a 500-calorie deficit is well-tolerated. If you are already relatively lean and trying to drop the last 10 pounds, a 250-calorie deficit — or even smaller — will protect muscle and keep your energy up.
• Your training intensity. Heavy strength training and high-volume cardio both demand fuel. A larger deficit can impair performance and recovery. Most people who lift seriously do best with a 300–500 calorie deficit, not 750+.
• Your history with dieting. If previous aggressive cuts have ended in rebound, a gentler pace now is a feature, not a weakness. Slow fat loss you sustain beats fast loss you abandon every time.
• Your schedule and stress load. High life stress + a large calorie cut is a difficult combination. Cortisol drives water retention and cravings. Sometimes the “correct” deficit on paper is the wrong one given your actual life.

The cutting calorie calculator lets you dial in any pace and see the resulting daily target alongside a macro split. Start conservative and tighten later if results stall — it’s much easier to cut a little more than to undo the muscle you lost chasing speed.

The protein floor

Calories determine whether you lose weight. Protein determines what you lose. In a deficit, your body can break down muscle tissue for energy alongside fat. High protein intake is the primary defence against that. The evidence-backed range is 0.7 to 1 gram of protein per pound of bodyweight per day (roughly 1.6 to 2.2 g/kg). Lean toward the higher end when:

• Your deficit is large (500+ calories).
• You are training hard while cutting.
• You are already fairly lean and protecting hard-earned muscle.

Protein also has a practical advantage for dieting: it is the most satiating macro. A high-protein meal keeps hunger quieter than the same calorie count in carbs or fat. It also has a higher thermic effect — roughly 20–30% of the calories from protein are burned in digestion, versus 5–10% for carbs and 0–3% for fat. That small edge adds up over weeks.

Use the macro calculator to split your calorie target into protein, carbs, and fat. A common starting split for fat loss is 35–40% protein, 30–35% carbs, 25–30% fat — but the protein floor matters far more than the exact ratios.

When to recalculate

Your calorie target is not set-and-forget. As you lose weight, your body gets lighter, which means it burns fewer calories at rest and during exercise. A target that put you in a 500-calorie deficit at 200 pounds may only be a 200-calorie deficit at 175 pounds.

The practical rule: recalculate your TDEE every 10–15 pounds of weight lost. Re-enter your current weight into the TDEE calculator, find your new maintenance number, and reset your deficit from there. This simple habit keeps fat loss moving when most people hit a plateau and assume something is broken.

Plateau troubleshooting — beyond recalculating — usually comes down to two things: tracking accuracy and patience. Research consistently shows people underestimate food intake by 20–30%, often through liquid calories, cooking fats, and portions eyeballed instead of weighed. A food scale for two weeks will tell you more than any new diet strategy.

Common mistakes that stall fat loss

1. Tracking inconsistently

   Logging meals during the week and guessing on weekends is a reliable route to a hidden calorie surplus. A Friday–Sunday blowout can erase a full week of careful eating. If you’re not losing, track every day, including weekends, for two weeks before changing anything else.

2. Drinking untracked calories

   Juice, lattes, sports drinks, alcohol, and even “healthy” smoothies are easy sources of several hundred uncounted calories a day. Liquid calories bypass the satiety signals that solid food triggers, so they rarely reduce how much you eat later.

3. Setting the deficit too large early on

   Cutting 1,000+ calories from day one tends to produce fast initial results, loud hunger, and an eventual rebound. Most people get further on a 400-calorie deficit held for six months than a 1,000-calorie deficit held for six weeks.

4. Ignoring protein

   A calorie deficit without enough protein means a meaningful share of the weight you lose is muscle, not fat. The scale might move fast, but body composition worsens. See the calorie deficit guide for more on why the composition of what you lose matters.

5. Not recalculating

   A target from 20 pounds ago is probably no longer accurate. Recalculate from your current weight regularly, and also when your activity level changes significantly — switching to a desk job or adding a second weekly run both move the number.