How many calories should I eat to lose weight?

Reviewed 1 November 2026 · How these numbers are calculated

Eat about 400–600 calories a day less than your maintenance to lose about 0.5% of your body weight a week, a pace most people can keep up. For a 40-year-old woman of 70 kg (154 lb) at 6,000 steps a day that's about 1,450 calories; for a man of 90 kg (198 lb), about 1,950. Don't go below 1,200 (women) or 1,500 (men) without medical support.

Worked examples

Calories a day to lose 0.5% of body weight a week (age 40, 6,000 steps)
Person	Burn	Eat	Per week	Weeks
Woman70 → 60 kg	1,830	1,450	0.35 kg0.8 lb	29
Woman85 → 70 kg	2,050	1,580	0.42 kg0.9 lb	36
Man90 → 80 kg	2,440	1,950	0.45 kg1.0 lb	23
Man110 → 90 kg	2,740	2,130	0.55 kg1.2 lb	37

Women 165 cm (5′5″), men 178 cm (5′10″). "Burn" is maintenance. Assumes 7,700 calories per kg of body fat; real progress wobbles week to week.

Step 1: find your maintenance

Maintenance is what you burn in a day: your resting burn plus daily life, steps, workouts and digestion. It depends mostly on your size and how much you move. See maintenance calories by daily steps.

Step 2: pick a pace

Deficitly suggests 0.5% of your body weight a week and allows up to 1%. Faster loss costs more muscle, leaves you hungrier and is harder to keep up. Each kg of body fat is about 7,700 calories, so 0.5 kg (1.1 lb) a week needs a deficit of about 550 calories a day.

Step 3: respect the minimum

Below 1,200 calories a day for women and 1,500 for men, diets are normally done with a doctor's support, because it gets hard to eat enough protein, vitamins and minerals. If your maintenance is low, moving more is the way to make room: see how many steps a day to lose weight.

Step 4: recalculate as you go

As you lose weight, your burn drops a little. Update your weight every few kilos. If the scale trend doesn't move for 3–4 weeks, trust the scale over the estimate and eat about 100–200 calories less.

Already eating a set amount?

Turn the question around: what eating 1,500 calories a day does, or whether 1,200 calories a day is safe. And for what to eat within your calories, see how much protein you need.