How Many Calories Should You Eat to Cut? The Complete Math, No Guru Nonsense.

July 10, 2026 | Ben Nelson, Founder of ShredCoach

When I started my cut at 221.7 lbs, I asked the internet how many calories I should eat. I got answers ranging from 1,200 to 2,800. All from people who sounded equally confident.

The truth is that the math isn't complicated — it's just personal. Here's how to actually work it out, the same way I did before losing 29.4 lbs in 130 days.

Step 1: Estimate Your Maintenance

Maintenance is the number of calories where your weight stays flat. The quick estimate that gets you close enough:

Bodyweight in pounds × 14-16 — use 14 if you're sedentary, 15 if you're moderately active, 16 if you're on your feet and training hard.

At 221.7 lbs and moderately active, my starting estimate was around 221.7 × 15 ≈ 3,300 calories. A 160-lb woman with a desk job might land around 160 × 14 ≈ 2,240.

This is an estimate, not a truth. The real number comes from step four.

Step 2: Pick Your Deficit Size

One pound of fat ≈ 3,500 calories. So your daily deficit sets your weekly rate of loss:

• 250/day → ~0.5 lb/week. Gentle. Good for lean people chasing the last 10 lbs. • 500/day → ~1 lb/week. The sweet spot for most people. • 750-1,000/day → 1.5-2 lbs/week. Aggressive. Sustainable mostly for people with a lot to lose, and it demands high protein and real food quality.

The rule of thumb worth respecting: aim to lose 0.5-1% of your bodyweight per week. Faster than that for months on end and you're increasingly burning muscle, tanking energy, and rehearsing a rebound.

Step 3: Do the Subtraction

Maintenance minus deficit. That's it. For me: ~3,300 − 800 ≈ 2,500 calories to start. For the 160-lb woman above: 2,240 − 500 ≈ 1,740.

Notice what this means: everyone's cutting number is different. The 1,200-calorie template diets floating around the internet are someone else's math — usually a small sedentary person's — being sold to everyone.

Step 4: Let Real Data Correct the Estimate

Here's the part every calculator leaves out: the formula was always going to be a little wrong. Metabolisms vary. Activity varies. Logging accuracy varies.

So run your number for two to three weeks, weigh daily, and compare your weekly average weight change to your target. Losing on pace? The number's right. Losing nothing? Drop 200. Losing way too fast, sleeping badly, feeling wrecked? Add 200. Your body is the calculator now — the arithmetic just gave it a starting point.

Two adjustments people forget as the cut goes on: your maintenance shrinks as you shrink (a lighter body burns less), so recalculate every 10-15 lbs lost. And weeks where the scale spikes from salt, carbs, or a big weekend don't count as "not losing" — that's water noise, which is a whole topic of its own.

Don't Forget the Floor

Deficits have a basement. Below roughly 1,200 calories for women and 1,500 for men, it becomes very difficult to get adequate protein and micronutrients, and the misery-to-results ratio falls apart. If the math says you need to eat less than that to lose, the better lever is almost always more movement — steps are a deficit you don't have to eat.

The Honest Summary

Bodyweight × 14-16, minus 500, high protein, track honestly, adjust every couple of weeks based on the trend. That one sentence is 90% of what works, and it's exactly the math ShredCoach runs for you on day one — then keeps correcting automatically as your real data comes in.

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— Ben