How Many Calories to Lose 1 Pound a Week

The short answer most people are looking for: to lose about 1 pound a week, you need a daily calorie deficit of roughly 500 calories below the amount your body burns. That comes from the old rule of thumb that one pound of body fat stores about 3,500 calories, so 500 × 7 days = 3,500 = one pound. It is a useful starting point, but it is also a simplification, and knowing where it breaks down is the difference between steady progress and an unexplained stall.

The deficit-to-rate table

Weight loss is driven by the gap between what you burn (your total daily energy expenditure, or TDEE) and what you eat. Pick a rate, find the deficit, and subtract it from your TDEE:

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends a steady 1 to 2 pounds per week as the rate most likely to stay off. Faster than that and you tend to lose more muscle and water, feel worse, and rebound harder. Slower (the 250-calorie line) is gentler, easier to stick to, and often the smartest choice if you have less to lose.

Step one: find your TDEE, then subtract

You cannot pick a deficit without first knowing your maintenance number. TDEE is your resting metabolism plus the calories you burn moving, digesting food, and exercising. It depends on your sex, age, height, weight, and activity level, so a generic "2,000 calories" figure is rarely right for any specific person.

The fastest way to get a personal number is to run the calorie calculator, which estimates your maintenance calories, then subtract your chosen deficit from the table above. A worked example:

• Your calculated TDEE: 2,300 calories/day
• Target rate: 1 lb per week → subtract 500
• Daily eating target: 2,300 − 500 = 1,800 calories/day

If 1,800 felt too aggressive, you could instead subtract 250 and eat 2,050 for a half-pound-per-week pace. Same math, gentler ramp.

Safe calorie floors (do not go below these)

A bigger deficit is not automatically better. Eat too little and you lose muscle, energy, and the nutrients you need, and you become far more likely to binge and quit. As a widely cited clinical guideline, women should not drop below about 1,200 calories per day and men not below about 1,500 without medical supervision. Major obesity-management guidelines and most registered dietitians use similar floors, and they treat these as conservative minimums rather than targets.

If your TDEE is low (common for shorter or older individuals), a flat 1,000-calorie deficit may push you under the floor. In that case, cap the cut at whatever keeps you above the floor and make up the rest with activity. This is exactly why the safe maximum is a rate, not a fixed deficit: someone burning 3,200 calories can safely lose 2 lb/week, while someone burning 1,700 cannot do it through diet alone.

Why the 3,500-calorie rule overpromises

Here is the honest part most pages skip. The "3,500 calories = 1 pound" rule treats your body like a simple bank account, but it does not behave that way over time:

• Metabolic adaptation. As you lose weight, your body gets smaller and more efficient, so your TDEE drops. The 500-calorie deficit you started with shrinks as your maintenance number falls toward your new intake.
• You do not burn pure fat. Early loss includes water and glycogen (which moves fast on the scale), and some lost weight is muscle, especially without resistance training and adequate protein.
• The math is linear; biology is not. Research from the NIH (whose Body Weight Planner models this directly) shows real-world loss runs slower than the 3,500 rule predicts over months because expenditure keeps adjusting downward.

The practical takeaway: expect the scale to move quickly the first week or two (mostly water), then settle into a slower, bumpier trend. A stall after a few weeks usually is not failure. It is your TDEE catching up.

What to do when progress stalls

When the scale flattens for two-plus weeks despite consistent eating, you have three levers, in order of preference:

1. Recheck your TDEE. You weigh less now, so recalculate and reset your target. This alone fixes most plateaus.
2. Move more. Adding steps or training widens the deficit without cutting food further, and it protects muscle.
3. Trim intake slightly only if the first two are maxed out, and never below your floor.

Also audit your tracking. Underreporting food is extremely common, and "a little oil here, a few bites there" quietly erases a 500-calorie deficit. If counting calories feels fragile, the trade-offs between counting calories and tracking macros are covered in macro counting vs calorie counting.

Putting it together

To lose a pound a week: get your maintenance number from the calorie calculator, subtract 500 (or 250 for a gentler 0.5 lb/week), stay above your calorie floor, prioritize protein and resistance training to keep muscle, and recalculate every 10 to 15 pounds. If you also want a target body weight to aim for, the ideal weight calculator gives healthy ranges, and the BMI calculator shows where you currently fall. These figures are estimates, not medical advice; check with a doctor or registered dietitian before starting an aggressive deficit, especially with any health condition.

Frequently Asked Questions