Calories
How many calories should you eat a day to lose weight?
Two steps and some honest arithmetic. No single number works for everybody, but the method behind the number is short enough to follow on one page.
Ask this question online and you get a number: 1,500. 1,200. 2,000. The number is the problem. Your calorie needs depend on how big you are, how old you are, whether you are male or female and how much you actually move — and any single figure is going to be a long way out for most of the people who read it.
What does transfer is the method. It is two steps, and you can follow it on this page.
The short answer
Work out what you burn in a day. Eat about a fifth less than that.
Here is the whole thing on one worked example. A woman, 32 years old, 168 cm, 82 kg, at a desk most of the day with three gym sessions a week:
Every one of those figures comes out of the two steps below, and you can do them for yourself with a phone calculator in about a minute.
Step one: your resting burn
This is what your body costs to run before you get out of bed — breathing, circulation, brain, repair. It is the largest part of what most people burn in a day, usually somewhere between 60–70% of the total, and it is the reason "eat less, move more" gets the emphasis backwards for a lot of people.
The standard way to estimate it is the Mifflin-St Jeor equation, which is what our calculator uses:
The equation
Men: (10 × weight in kg) + (6.25 × height in cm) − (5 × age) + 5
Women: (10 × weight in kg) + (6.25 × height in cm) − (5 × age) − 161
For the woman above: (10 × 82) + (6.25 × 168) − (5 × 32) − 161 = 1,549 kcal.
It is an estimate, not a measurement. Individual people sit above or below their predicted figure, and body composition is part of why — more muscle means a higher resting burn at the same weight. Treat the output as a starting point that the scale will correct over a few weeks.
Step two: your maintenance
Now multiply by how much you move. This gives maintenance — the amount that keeps your weight where it is.
| If your week looks like | Multiply by |
|---|---|
| Desk job, little deliberate exercise | 1.2 |
| Light exercise, 1–3 days a week | 1.375 |
| Moderate exercise, 3–5 days a week | 1.55 |
| Hard exercise, 6–7 days a week | 1.725 |
| Physical job, or training twice a day | 1.9 |
1,549 × 1.375 = 2,130 kcal for our example.
This is the step people get wrong, and they get it wrong in one direction. Three gym sessions on top of an office job and a car is "light", not "very active". A week of desk work in air conditioning with a 45-minute class on Tuesday and Thursday is 1.375. Picking 1.725 because the sessions felt hard adds around 540 calories to the estimate, which is most of a deficit — and then the scale does not move and the method looks broken.
If you are genuinely unsure, take the lower multiplier. The scale will tell you within three weeks whether you guessed low.
Step three: take about a fifth off
Our calculator sets a loss target at 20% below maintenance. For the example: 2,130 × 0.8 = 1,700 kcal a day.
A percentage rather than a flat figure, and that is deliberate. "Cut 500 calories" is the advice you see most often, but 500 is a quarter of what a small, older woman eats and about a seventh of what a tall, active man eats. The same instruction is aggressive for one and barely noticeable for the other. A fifth scales with the person.
To turn that gap into an expected rate: a kilo of body fat holds roughly 7,700 kcal. Our example is 430 calories a day short of maintenance, so 430 × 7 ÷ 7,700 = about 0.4 kg a week.
Over a month that is around 1.7 kg. It is less than the numbers in the adverts, and it is the rate that tends to still be happening in month four.
A sensible range
Most people can hold a loss of about 0.5–1% of body weight a week without losing more muscle than they need to, or hating the process. For a 100 kg person that is 0.5–1 kg a week; for a 60 kg person it is 0.3–0.6 kg. Faster is not better, and the early weeks always flatter you because some of the first drop is water and gut contents rather than fat.
The floor you should not go under
Whatever the arithmetic says, our calculator will not show a target below 1,200 kcal for women or 1,500 for men. Those are floors, not goals.
The reason is practical rather than dramatic. Under those levels it becomes genuinely difficult to fit in enough protein to protect muscle, enough fibre to stay comfortable, and enough variety to cover vitamins and minerals — and it is very hard to keep doing for more than a fortnight. Extreme restriction also tends to be followed by the kind of rebound that undoes the month.
If your maintenance is low enough that a fifth off lands under the floor, the useful lever is the other side of the equation: more walking, more daily movement, some resistance training. Adding 2,000 steps a day does more for most people than removing another 200 calories.
What 400 calories looks like here
A deficit on a spreadsheet is abstract. In a UAE week it is usually two or three specific habits. Approximate figures, because every kitchen and every shop differs:
| Item | Roughly | Where the calories are |
|---|---|---|
| Karak chai, sweetened, with evaporated milk | 90–150 kcal | Sugar and the milk. Three a day is a meal. |
| Chicken shawarma wrap | 400–600 kcal | The bread, the garlic sauce and the fries inside it. |
| Restaurant chicken machboos plate | 550–900 kcal | Portion size and the ghee the rice is cooked in. |
| Luqaimat, a small plate | 250–400 kcal | Fried dough and date syrup. |
| Fresh juice, large | 200–350 kcal | Several pieces of fruit with the fibre removed. |
Read that list again and you can see where most people's deficit actually comes from. It is rarely the rice. It is the three sweetened teas, the sauce, and the drink that came with the meal — the things nobody counts because they are not the food.
None of these are foods to eliminate. Karak with less sugar, a shawarma without the fries in it, and machboos eaten at home where you control the ghee will get most people their fifth without a single item being banned. A plan you resent is a plan you abandon.
Three things that make the number wrong
Counting the food and not the cooking
A tablespoon of oil is about 120 calories and it is invisible in a finished dish. Restaurant and home cooking both use more than people estimate. If you are tracking, log the oil and the ghee.
Choosing the activity level you would like to have
Covered above, and it is the single most common error. Overstating activity by one band is worth roughly 200–500 calories a day.
Never recalculating
The target that was right at 95 kg is not right at 85 kg. A smaller body burns less at rest, and people in a deficit also fidget, walk and stand less without being aware of it — research on people who have lost around a tenth of their body weight finds total daily expenditure down by considerably more than the weight loss alone accounts for.
In practice: run the numbers again every 4–6 kg, or every couple of months. It takes a minute and it is the difference between a plateau and a plan.
What to do with the number
A calorie target on its own is a budget with no shopping list. Two things make it work:
- Protein first. It protects muscle while you lose and it is the macronutrient that keeps you full longest. How much protein you need in a day has the figure and where to get it here.
- Food you would eat anyway. A target you hit with food you like is worth more than a perfect plan you follow for nine days. Our high-protein shopping list for UAE supermarkets is built around what is actually on the shelves at Lulu, Carrefour, Nesto and Union Coop.
And if the scale stops moving, that is a solvable problem with a short list of causes — why the scale is not moving goes through them in order.
Questions people ask
Is 1,200 calories a day enough to lose weight?
For most adult women it is the lowest sensible figure rather than a target to aim at, and our calculator will not show anything below it — 1,500 for men. Below those levels it gets hard to eat enough protein, fibre and micronutrients, and hunger tends to win before the month does. If the arithmetic pushes your target under the floor, the answer is usually to add activity rather than to cut food further.
How many calories should I cut to lose 1 kg a week?
A kilo of body fat holds roughly 7,700 kcal, so a kilo a week implies about 1,100 fewer calories a day. That is a very large gap for most people and a fifth off maintenance rarely reaches it. Around 0.5–1% of your body weight a week is the range most people can actually hold, which for an 85 kg person is about 0.4–0.8 kg.
Do I need to eat less on rest days?
You do not have to. Training burns less than most people assume, and eating the same amount every day is far easier to stick to than juggling two numbers. What matters much more is the weekly total.
Does the number change as I lose weight?
Yes, and this is the step almost everyone skips. A smaller body costs less to run, and people also move less without noticing while they are eating less. Recalculate every 4–6 kg or every couple of months, whichever comes first.
Can I just use a number I saw online?
A generic 1,500 or 2,000 will be roughly right for some people and badly wrong for others — the same figure can be a mild deficit for one person and a third of another's maintenance. Two people of the same weight can differ by several hundred calories a day on height, age and activity alone.