How Many Calories Should You Eat a Day to Lose Weight?

It’s the most-Googled diet question there is: how many calories should I eat to lose weight? The honest answer is that there’s no universal number. The figure that melts fat off one person will leave another exhausted and stalled, because your target depends on your size, your activity and how fast you want to go. The good news: it’s easy to estimate.

Start with how much you burn

Before you can cut, you need to know your baseline — the calories your body uses in a day. That’s your TDEE (Total Daily Energy Expenditure), and it’s built from two parts:

1. BMR — what you’d burn lying in bed all day, just keeping you alive. You can estimate it with our BMR calculator.
2. Activity — everything on top: walking, training, fidgeting, work. Multiply your BMR by an activity factor to get your TDEE, or skip the math with the TDEE calculator.

Your TDEE is your maintenance number — eat that, and your weight holds steady. To lose, you eat below it.

Then subtract a sensible deficit

Weight loss is a calorie deficit, full stop. The size of that deficit sets your speed:

• A 500-calorie daily deficit ≈ half a kilo (about a pound) of fat per week. This is the classic, sustainable default.
• A 750–1,000 deficit loses faster but is harder to stick to and risks muscle loss.
• A 250 deficit is slow but almost effortless — good if you have little to lose.

So if your TDEE is 2,200, a steady target is around 1,700 calories a day. We go deeper on choosing the right gap in how big a calorie deficit you need.

Don’t go too low

Aggressively slashing calories backfires. Very low intakes are hard to sustain, strip away muscle along with fat, and tank your energy. As a general floor, most adults shouldn’t drop below roughly 1,200 calories (women) or 1,500 (men) without medical supervision. Slower and steady almost always wins.

A worked example

Say you’re moderately active with a TDEE of 2,400:

• Comfortable loss: 1,900/day (−500) → ~0.5 kg/week.
• Faster: 1,650/day (−750) → ~0.7 kg/week, harder to hold.
• Gentle: 2,150/day (−250) → ~0.25 kg/week, barely noticeable as a diet.

Pick the one you can actually live with for months, not the most aggressive one you can survive for a week.

Hitting the number is the real work

Calculating the target takes five minutes. Hitting it every day is the part that decides results — and that comes down to tracking what you eat without it becoming a chore. Watch the weekly trend, not the daily wobble, and adjust every few weeks as your weight (and therefore your TDEE) drops.

Nishnush handles the tedious half: snap a photo of your meal and it logs the calories and macros, so you can see where you land against your target without weighing or searching a database. Set a realistic number, log honestly, and let the trend do the talking.