How Many Calories to Lose Weight: The Daily Number Explained
To lose weight, eat fewer calories than you burn each day. Find your maintenance calories with TDEE = BMR × activity, then subtract a deficit to set a daily target. This guide works the full chain end to end.
To lose weight you eat fewer calories than your body burns. First estimate maintenance calories:
TDEE = BMR × activity multiplier. Then subtract a daily deficit to get your target:Target = TDEE − deficit. A steady deficit produces a steady loss, since stored fat carries a fixed amount of energy.
The fastest route to your number is the TDEE calculator, which returns your maintenance calories plus loss and gain targets in one step. The sections below show the same chain by hand so you can see where every figure comes from. This is general information, not medical advice.
Weight loss comes down to energy balance
Your body spends energy every day, and food replaces it. When you take in less than you spend, the body covers the gap by drawing on stored fat, and you lose weight. When intake matches expenditure, weight holds steady. That steady-state intake is called maintenance, and every target for loss is built by subtracting from it.
The reason a deficit works in predictable amounts is that body fat stores a roughly fixed amount of energy. A pound of fat and a kilogram of fat each represent a known calorie total, so a deficit of a given size maps onto a loss of a given weight over time.
Start with BMR, the calories you burn at rest
Your body burns most of its energy just staying alive. Breathing, circulation, and keeping warm account for the largest share of daily expenditure, and that baseline is your basal metabolic rate. The Mifflin-St Jeor equation estimates it from weight, height, age, and sex, with separate constants for men and women.
Work one example all the way through. Take a man who is thirty years old, weighs eighty kilograms, and stands one hundred eighty centimetres tall. Plug those into the men's equation to get his resting burn.
You can run your own figures through the BMR calculator if you would rather not do the arithmetic.
Scale BMR up to TDEE with an activity multiplier
BMR only covers rest. Moving around, exercising, and digesting food all add to the total, so maintenance calories are higher than BMR. The standard method multiplies BMR by an activity factor that reflects how much you move on a typical day. The result is total daily energy expenditure, your maintenance number.
Pick the factor that matches a normal week, not your best one. Our example man trains a few times a week and is otherwise on his feet, which puts him at moderately active. Multiplying his resting burn by that factor gives his maintenance calories.
Subtract a deficit to set the target
Maintenance holds weight steady, so to lose you eat below it. The size of the gap sets the pace of loss, and the fat-energy rule converts one into the other. A deficit of around five hundred calories a day removes about a pound a week, and doubling it roughly doubles the loss.
250 kcal/day → about 0.5 lb/week 500 kcal/day → about 1 lb/week 1,000 kcal/day → about 2 lb/week
Apply a deficit to the example. Taking the man's maintenance figure and removing a standard daily deficit gives the number of calories he would eat to lose about a pound a week.
The macro calculator then splits a target like this into protein, carbohydrate, and fat if you want to plan meals around it.
How many calories to lose 1 pound a week
A pound of fat carries a set amount of energy, so to shed one in a week you spread that total across seven days. Dividing the per-pound figure by seven gives the daily deficit, which is why the five-hundred-a-day guideline lines up with a pound a week. To lose half a pound, halve the deficit; to aim for two pounds, double it.
Faster is not freely better. Larger deficits speed loss but get harder to sustain and can cut into muscle, and very low intakes leave too little room for nutrients. A common floor is to keep daily intake above a sensible minimum and to avoid sitting below your BMR for long stretches.
Real-world loss also runs a little slower than the arithmetic predicts, because the body adapts as you get lighter and burns slightly less. Recheck your numbers every few weeks as your weight changes, and treat the target as a starting estimate rather than a fixed rule.
The short version
Find what you burn, then eat under it. Estimate BMR from your size, age, and sex, scale it to maintenance with an activity multiplier, and subtract a deficit sized to the pace you want. Keep the deficit moderate, stay above a sensible floor, and recheck as your weight drops. To skip the steps, enter your details into the TDEE calculator and read the loss target it returns.
Common questions
Eat below your maintenance calories. Find maintenance with TDEE = BMR × activity multiplier, then subtract a daily deficit to set your target with Target = TDEE − deficit. The right figure depends on your weight, height, age, sex, and activity, so run them through the TDEE calculator for a personalised number.
For most healthy adults a moderate daily deficit is a common starting point and is generally considered sustainable. The right size varies by person, and anyone with a health condition or on medication should set targets with a clinician rather than from a formula alone.
Eating under your basal rate for a short time is not automatically harmful, but doing so for long stretches makes it hard to meet nutrient needs and can prompt the body to conserve energy. Most guidance keeps intake above BMR and above a sensible daily floor unless a professional is supervising.
No. Counting is one way to hold a deficit, but portion control, food choices, and activity can create the same gap without tracking every meal. A calorie target is useful mainly as a reference point for how much room you have.
