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Calories
The number itself is easy arithmetic. The part that decides whether it works is choosing a deficit you can still be holding in eight weeks.
Estimate your maintenance calories, then eat 300–500 fewer per day. That is roughly 0.25–0.5 kg of fat loss a week for most people. Bigger deficits do not make the fat leave faster in any way that lasts — they make the hunger, the mood and the dropout arrive sooner.
Maintenance is what you burn in a day: your resting metabolism, everything you move, and the energy it costs to digest food. Most adults land somewhere between 1,600 and 3,000 calories.
A quick estimate that is close enough to start with:
| Activity level | What that means | Maintenance |
|---|---|---|
| Sedentary | Desk job, little deliberate exercise | bodyweight kg × 28–30 |
| Lightly active | On your feet some of the day, 1–3 sessions a week | bodyweight kg × 31–33 |
| Active | Training 4–5 times a week | bodyweight kg × 34–36 |
| Very active | Physical job or training most days | bodyweight kg × 37–40 |
A 75 kg person training four times a week is therefore around 2,550–2,700 calories at maintenance. Every calculator you will find, including this one, is an estimate with a margin of several hundred calories — which is exactly why the next step matters more than the arithmetic.
The honest version of this question is not "what does the formula say" but "what happens when I eat that much". Log your food for two weeks without changing anything, weigh yourself several mornings a week, and take the average of each week.
If the two weekly averages are the same, whatever you ate is your actual maintenance — a far better number than any equation, because it already accounts for how much you fidget, how much you walk and how much you underestimate.
| Deficit per day | Roughly per week | Realistic for |
|---|---|---|
| 200–300 kcal | 0.2–0.3 kg | Already lean, or protecting hard training |
| 300–500 kcal | 0.3–0.5 kg | Most people, most of the time |
| 500–750 kcal | 0.5–0.75 kg | Higher starting weight, short blocks only |
| Over 1,000 kcal | — | Hard to hold, and rarely stays off |
Two floors are worth respecting regardless of the maths: roughly 1,500 calories for men and 1,200 for women. Below those it gets difficult to hit protein, fibre and micronutrients, and the deficit stops being a nutrition plan and starts being a countdown to the day you abandon it.
A smaller body burns less. Losing 10 kg lowers maintenance by roughly 150–250 calories a day, which is most of a modest deficit — and it is the single most common reason people describe themselves as "eating the same and stalling". They are eating the same. The body is not.
Recheck every 5–10 kg, or whenever the weekly average has been flat for three weeks.
None of that is a discipline problem — it is a measurement problem, and measurement problems are fixable. Scanning a barcode takes two seconds and removes the guesswork for anything packaged. For the rest, logging in slices and spoons is accurate enough and survives longer than weighing everything.
In a deficit, protein is what decides whether the weight you lose is fat or muscle. Around 1.6–2.2 g per kg of bodyweight is the range with the evidence behind it. Set that first, keep training, and let carbs and fat fill the rest according to what you actually enjoy eating.
Estimate your maintenance calories, then subtract 300 to 500 per day. For most adults that lands between 1,500 and 2,200 calories and produces roughly 0.25 to 0.5 kg of loss per week. Very few people should go below 1,500 calories for men or 1,200 for women.
For most adults it is too low. It makes protein and micronutrient targets hard to hit, and the hunger tends to end the attempt before the results arrive. It is occasionally appropriate for smaller, sedentary people under supervision, but it is a floor rather than a target.
Usually one of three things: maintenance has fallen because you are lighter, intake has crept up without being logged, or you are comparing single weigh-ins instead of weekly averages. Check the weekly average over three weeks before changing anything.
Around 0.5 to 1 percent of bodyweight per week is a reasonable ceiling. Faster than that and a larger share of the loss tends to come from muscle, particularly if protein is low or you are not doing resistance training.
Everything above depends on one thing: knowing what you actually ate, on the days you did not feel like counting. That is the job NutriMacro is built for.
NutriMacro is a nutrition and training tracker for iPhone and Android. It logs food by barcode, photo or search, counts food in slices and units rather than grams, and keeps strength training, GPS activities, sleep and recovery in the same daily view. It runs in the language of your phone across 108 countries.
These are general guidelines for healthy adults, not medical advice. If you are pregnant, under 18, managing a health condition, or have a history of disordered eating, talk to a GP or a registered dietitian before changing how much you eat.
Read next: How much protein do I need? Calorie deficit guide Calculating macros
