Most people set up a cut by picking a round number — 2,000 calories, because it sounds like a diet — and then wondering why they're either starving or not losing anything.
There's a better way, and it takes about ten minutes. Here's the whole process, with real numbers.
Step 1: Find your maintenance
Maintenance is the intake at which your weight holds steady. Every deficit is defined relative to it, so this is the number everything else depends on.
Two ways to get it.
The fast estimate. Multiply your body weight in kilograms by 30–33 if you train three to five times a week and aren't especially active otherwise. For an 85 kg man that's roughly 2,550–2,800 calories. In pounds, multiply by about 14–15.
The accurate version. Eat normally for two weeks, log everything honestly, and weigh yourself each morning under the same conditions. If your average weight in week two matches week one, your average intake is your maintenance. This takes two weeks and beats any formula, because it accounts for your actual activity, job and NEAT rather than a population average.
If you're impatient, use the estimate. Just know it's a starting hypothesis, not a fact — step 4 is where it gets corrected.
Step 2: Set the deficit by target rate, not by feel
Don't pick a deficit size. Pick a rate of loss, then work backwards.
The rate that the evidence supports for people who lift is 0.5–1% of body weight per week. That comes from Garthe and colleagues (2011), who compared slow and fast weight loss in athletes: the slower rate preserved strength and lean mass, the aggressive one did not. The evidence-based guidelines from Helms, Aragon and Fitschen (2014) land in the same territory.
For our 85 kg man, that's 0.43–0.85 kg per week. Roughly 7,700 calories are needed per kilogram of fat, so:
- 0.5 kg/week ≈ a 550 calorie daily deficit
- 0.75 kg/week ≈ an 825 calorie daily deficit
Start at the conservative end. You can always increase the deficit later; you can't un-lose muscle.
Two rules of thumb worth holding on to. The further from lean you are, the faster you can safely go — someone at 25% tolerates the upper end, someone at 13% should sit at the bottom. And don't exceed about 25% below maintenance, regardless of what the arithmetic says.
Step 3: Fill the number with protein first
Calories decide whether you lose weight. Macros heavily influence whether that loss comes from fat or muscle.
Set them in this order:
Protein first. This is the non-negotiable one during a cut. The meta-analysis by Morton et al. (2018) put the intake where muscle-building benefits plateau at around 1.6 g per kg of body weight, and in a deficit the sensible move is to sit above that. Around 2 g per kg is a practical target — 170 g for our 85 kg man, which is 680 calories.
Fat second. Don't drive it too low; it matters for hormones and for satiety. About 0.8 g per kg is a reasonable floor — 68 g here, or 612 calories.
Carbohydrate fills the rest. Carbs fuel training quality, which is what lets you keep lifting heavy, which is what tells your body to keep the muscle. They are not the enemy.
The full worked example, for an 85 kg man with maintenance around 2,700:
| Setting | Value |
|---|---|
| Maintenance | 2,700 kcal |
| Target rate | 0.6 kg/week |
| Daily deficit | ~660 kcal |
| Cutting intake | ~2,040 kcal |
| Protein | 170 g (680 kcal) |
| Fat | 68 g (612 kcal) |
| Carbs | ~187 g (748 kcal) |
That's a setup you can actually eat, train on, and sustain for twelve weeks.
Step 4: The adjustment rule (this matters more than step 1)
Here's the part that separates cuts that work from cuts that stall, and it's why getting your starting maintenance perfect doesn't matter much.
Weigh yourself every morning under identical conditions, and only ever judge the weekly average against the previous weekly average.
Daily weight is noise. It swings a kilo or more from sodium, carbohydrate intake, water, training the day before, and whether you've been to the bathroom. People who react to the daily number spend a cut on an emotional rollercoaster and frequently slash calories in response to a fluctuation that was never fat.
Then apply this every two weeks:
- Losing within the target range? Change nothing. This is the hardest instruction to follow and the most valuable one.
- Losing faster than 1% per week? Add roughly 150–200 calories back. Yes, add. Faster is not better here.
- Not losing after two full weeks? Reduce by 150–200 calories, or add activity. Small corrections.
- Losing nothing for two weeks while feeling terrible? That's usually not a metabolic problem, it's a tracking problem or a sleep problem.
Adjusting every two weeks rather than every few days is deliberate. One week of data can't distinguish real change from water.
The stall that isn't a stall
Somewhere around weeks three to five your weight will flatten for a week or more while you're doing everything right. This derails more cuts than anything else.
Some of it is water masking real fat loss — glycogen shifts, sodium, and training stress all move fluid around in ways that hide several days of genuine progress. Some of it is real: Trexler and colleagues (2014) reviewed metabolic adaptation, the set of responses that reduce energy expenditure during sustained dieting. That's the basis for structured diet breaks and refeeds.
The practical response to a two-week stall is not to panic-cut. It's to check your tracking honestly first, check your sleep, and only then adjust by a small amount. If you've been dieting for eight weeks or more, a planned week at maintenance is often more productive than another cut.
Things that quietly break the whole setup
- Untracked liquid calories and cooking oil. A tablespoon of olive oil is roughly 120 calories, and most people pour two or three without registering it.
- Weekends. Five disciplined days and two loose ones can erase the entire weekly deficit. The maths doesn't care that it was only two days.
- Cutting the weight on the bar. Training lighter because you're in a deficit removes the signal that tells your body the muscle is still needed. Keep the load, reduce volume if you have to.
- Short sleep. Nedeltcheva et al. (2010) found that on an identical diet, restricted sleep shifted a substantially larger share of the weight lost from fat to lean tissue. This is the most-ignored variable in the entire process.
- Starting without an end date. A cut is a project with a finish line and a maintenance phase afterwards. An indefinite diet is how people end up regaining everything.
The short version
Estimate maintenance, take 15–25% off, set protein around 2 g/kg, keep fat reasonable, let carbs fuel your training, and then leave it alone for two weeks at a time while you track the weekly average.
The starting numbers matter far less than most people assume. What matters is picking a defensible number, giving it long enough to produce signal, and adjusting slowly when it doesn't.
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Educational content, not medical advice. If you're recovering from injury or illness, or have a history of disordered eating, talk to a qualified professional before restricting calories.