If you've spent any time on fitness social media, you've probably seen a dozen contradictory answers to this question in the span of five minutes. Eat 1,200 calories. Never go below 1,500. Count macros, not calories. Intermittent fasting fixes everything. It's exhausting, and most of it is either oversimplified or trying to sell you something.
Here's the actual answer, without the noise.
The one rule that actually matters
Fat loss happens when you consistently eat fewer calories than your body burns. That's it — that's the whole mechanism. Everything else (meal timing, food combinations, "clean" vs "dirty" foods) affects how easy or sustainable that deficit is, but none of it replaces the deficit itself. If you remember nothing else from this article, remember that.
The confusion mostly comes from people mixing up "what creates fat loss" with "what makes fat loss easier to sustain." Both matter. They're just different questions.
Step 1: Find your maintenance calories
Your maintenance level is how many calories keep your weight stable. A reasonable starting estimate:
- Sedentary (desk job, little exercise): bodyweight (lbs) × 13–14
- Moderately active (some exercise, on your feet a fair amount): bodyweight (lbs) × 15–16
- Very active (physical job or serious training volume): bodyweight (lbs) × 17–18
This is a starting estimate, not a law of physics — everyone's metabolism varies, and the only way to know your true maintenance is to track your intake and weight for two to three weeks and see what actually happens.
Step 2: Create a deficit that doesn't wreck your life
Once you know maintenance, subtract 15–25% for fat loss. A smaller deficit (15%) is slower but easier to stick to and preserves more muscle and energy for training. A bigger deficit (25%) moves faster but is harder to sustain and more likely to end in a binge-and-quit cycle.
For most people, especially beginners, a 500-calorie daily deficit is a reasonable target — roughly a pound of fat loss per week. Not because 500 is magic, but because it's aggressive enough to see progress without making you miserable enough to give up in two weeks.
A word of caution: don't go below 1,200 calories (women) or 1,500 calories (men) without medical supervision, regardless of how much weight you want to lose. Extremely low intakes tank your energy, wreck your workouts, and make it dramatically harder to hit your protein target — which brings us to the part people skip.
Step 3: Protect your protein
This is the part most "just eat less" advice ignores, and it's the difference between losing fat and losing muscle along with the fat. Aim for roughly 0.7–1g of protein per pound of bodyweight per day. Protein is the most satiating macronutrient (it keeps you full longer per calorie), and it's the raw material your body needs to hold onto muscle while you're in a deficit. Losing weight without protecting protein just means you end up smaller and softer, not leaner.
What nobody tells you about the process
Weight loss isn't linear. You'll have weeks where the scale doesn't move despite doing everything right — water retention, sodium, hormonal fluctuations, and simple day-to-day noise all mask the underlying trend. This is normal. Look at your weekly average over 3–4 weeks, not the daily number, before deciding whether something needs to change.
And when the scale does move, most of it should be the boring, unglamorous stuff: a bit less food than you're burning, most days, for long enough that the math catches up. Not a supplement, not a specific meal timing hack, not cutting out an entire food group. Just a sustainable deficit, protected protein, and consistency measured in months, not days.
If figuring out your exact numbers feels like a lot to track manually, FitPlanCoach calculates your calorie and protein targets from your actual stats and goal, and adjusts your plan as your weight changes — so you're not doing this math by hand every week.