How many calories to eat to lose weight
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Eat about 500 calories a day under your maintenance to start, which loses about a pound a week at first. Aim for 0.5 to 1 percent of your weight a week. Stop at the floor: never under your resting burn, and never under 1,200 calories a day for women or 1,500 for men without a doctor.
What we’d do
Find your maintenance from your steps with the calories calculator, take off 500, and check the result against the floor. Hold it for four weeks and weigh in most mornings. If the trend is falling at your pace, keep going. If it isn’t, change the target by 100 to 200 calories, never by 500. Re-work it every 10 to 15 pounds.
If the floor stops you short of the pace you want, walk more instead of eating less. And eat your protein every day, 1.2 to 1.6 g per kg of your body weight.
If you remember three things
- Start about 500 calories under your maintenance. That’s about a pound a week at the start.
- The floor is your resting burn, and 1,200 for women or 1,500 for men. Whichever is higher.
- Your target moves as you lose. Maintenance drops about 10 calories a day for every pound you lose.
Why does everyone get told the same number?
Ask around and you’ll hear 1,200 calories, as if it were the number for weight loss. A 5 foot 2 woman who sits most of the day and a 6 foot 2 man who walks 12,000 steps get the same advice. For her, 1,200 might be a modest cut. For him, it’s about a third of what he burns.
A calorie target works like a speed. Telling everyone to eat 1,200 calories is like telling every driver to do 45 miles an hour. On a highway that’s crawling. Outside a school it’s reckless. What matters is the gap between your target and your own maintenance, and that gap is what sets your pace. More in should everyone eat 1,200 calories?
How do you set your target?
- Find your maintenance. Your calories from your steps gives it as a range. Start from the middle.
- Pick a pace. 0.5 to 1 percent of your weight a week. Nearer 0.5 if you’re already fairly lean.
- Turn the pace into a daily gap. The rule of thumb is 3,500 calories per pound, so each pound a week is about 500 calories a day.
- Check the floor. Your target can’t go under your resting burn, or under 1,200 a day for women or 1,500 for men.
- Hold it for four weeks. The first week mostly shows water, so judge the trend from weeks two to four.
- Correct it from your trend. Slower than planned, take off 100 to 200. Faster, add some back.
- Re-work it every 10 to 15 pounds. Each pound lost lowers your maintenance by about 10 calories a day.
The calories to lose calculator does steps two to four and gives you a date.
Where’s the floor, and why?
The 2013 US obesity guideline suggests diets of 1,200 to 1,500 calories a day for women and 1,500 to 1,800 for men, adjusted for body weight, or a cut of 500 or 750 calories a day. It says diets under 800 calories should only be used with medical monitoring, because of the rapid loss and the risk of complications.
We take the low end of those ranges as a floor, and we add one more: your resting burn. Eating under your resting burn means your daily gap is bigger than everything you spend moving and digesting. The faster you go, the more muscle you put at risk. In a 2011 trial of 24 elite athletes, the group losing 0.7% of body weight a week gained 2.1% lean mass while losing the same weight as a group losing faster, which gained none. And hunger climbs as you lose. A 2016 analysis estimated appetite rises by about 100 calories a day for every kilogram lost, more than three times the drop in burn.
Moderate The 1,200 and 1,500 floors are the guideline’s diets. The resting burn floor is our own rule, stricter than the guideline, based on the evidence that bigger gaps cost more muscle and more hunger.
Here’s what the floor does for a 35 year old woman, 5 foot 5 and 170 pounds, with a maintenance of about 2,020 and a resting burn of about 1,470.
| Pace she picks | Daily gap | Target | What happens |
|---|---|---|---|
| Half a pound a week | 250 | 1,770 | Fine |
| 1 pound a week | 500 | 1,520 | Fine, just above her floor |
| 1.5 pounds a week | 750 | 1,270 | Under her resting burn, so it stops at 1,470, about 1.1 pounds a week |
If she wants more speed, steps beat a lower target. Walking 4,000 more steps a day burns about 135 calories at her weight, which buys back most of that half pound.
How fast should you go?
The CDC says people who lose 1 to 2 pounds a week are more likely to keep it off. We’d put it as a share of your weight, because 2 pounds a week means something different at 300 pounds than at 140.
| You weigh | 0.5% a week | 1% a week | Daily gap at the start |
|---|---|---|---|
| 150 pounds | 0.75 pounds | 1.5 pounds | 375 to 750 |
| 200 pounds | 1 pound | 2 pounds | 500 to 1,000 |
| 250 pounds | 1.25 pounds | 2.5 pounds | 625 to 1,250 |
We’d keep the daily gap at or under 1,000 calories, even at 250 pounds. The athlete trial above is the main evidence for going slower: same loss, more muscle kept, at 0.7% a week. It was small and in lean people, so the case is strongest the leaner you are.
Why doesn’t the weight keep coming off at the same speed?
The 3,500 calories per pound rule dates from 1958. It describes the energy in the weight you lose, and it says nothing about what happens next. As you lose, you burn less, so a fixed cut shrinks.
A 500 calorie cut, a year later
A mathematical model of body weight, 2011. Hall and colleagues, The Lancet
For an average adult with overweight, each 10 calories a day of permanent change in intake ends at about 1 pound of weight change. Half of it comes in about a year and 95% in about three. So a 500 calorie cut loses about 25 pounds in the first year and about 50 in all. The 3,500 rule would have said 52 pounds in a year.
An average. Your own curve depends on your size and what you do as you lose.
The early weeks are partly water
23 adults on a diet over 24 weeks, plus 75 in a 13 week study, 2012. Heymsfield and colleagues, Metabolism
In the first month, each pound lost held fewer calories than the pounds lost later. Glycogen, the body’s stored carbs, is kept with three to four times its weight in water, so it goes fast and comes back fast.
The exact numbers vary by person and by diet.
The 3,500 figure fits people with a lot of fat to lose. For leaner people it overstates the calories in each pound lost. Either way, the fix is the same: re-work your target as you go, and let your trend correct it.
How much protein?
Most people losing weight do well on 1.2 to 1.6 g of protein per kg of body weight a day, the range in the 2025 to 2030 US Dietary Guidelines. Under that is too low. The Gyroscope app personalizes yours, and these typical ranges show you if you’re short.
| You weigh | Too low | Typical while losing |
|---|---|---|
| 150 pounds | Under 80 g | 80 to 110 g |
| 170 pounds | Under 90 g | 90 to 125 g |
| 200 pounds | Under 110 g | 110 to 145 g |
| 260 pounds, goal 180 | Under 125 g | 125 to 170 g |
If more than a fifth of your weight is to lose, count from your goal plus a fifth of what you weigh now. That’s why the last row isn’t counted from 260. The protein calculator works it out for you.
11 sources
- Jensen et al., 2013 AHA/ACC/TOS guideline for the management of overweight and obesity in adults, Circulation, 2014pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- CDC, Steps for losing weightcdc.gov
- Hall et al., Quantification of the effect of energy imbalance on bodyweight, The Lancet, 2011pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Hall, What is the required energy deficit per unit weight loss?, International Journal of Obesity, 2008pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Wishnofsky, Caloric equivalents of gained or lost weight, American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 1958pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Heymsfield et al., Energy content of weight loss: kinetic features during voluntary caloric restriction, Metabolism, 2012pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Kreitzman, Coxon and Szaz, Glycogen storage: illusions of easy weight loss, excessive weight regain, and distortions in estimates of body composition, American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 1992pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Garthe et al., Effect of two different weight-loss rates on body composition and strength and power-related performance in elite athletes, International Journal of Sport Nutrition and Exercise Metabolism, 2011pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Polidori et al., How strongly does appetite counter weight loss? Quantification of the feedback control of human energy intake, Obesity, 2016pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- US Department of Agriculture and US Department of Health and Human Services, Dietary Guidelines for Americans, 2025 to 2030realfood.gov
- Mifflin et al., A new predictive equation for resting energy expenditure in healthy individuals, American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 1990pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
