How Many Calories Should You Eat To Lose Weight?

Two colleagues start the same 1,500-calorie diet chart on the same Monday. Six weeks later, one has lost four kilos and the other has lost nothing but patience.

Nothing mysterious happened. The same intake met two different bodies - different heights, weights, ages, and very different days. That's why there's no one-size-fits-all answer to the question, "How many calories should I eat to lose weight?" It has your answer, and finding it is arithmetic, not luck.

The number your body already spends

Weight loss runs on one relationship: eat fewer calories than your body uses, and it draws the difference from stored fat. So the first job is not choosing what to cut - it is finding out what you burn. That figure is your Total Daily Energy Expenditure, or TDEE: your basal metabolic rate (the energy spent simply keeping you alive) plus everything you do in a day, from the commute to the stairs to digesting lunch. For most adults, the basal rate alone is the largest share of the day’s burn; movement adds to it, but less than people hope.

Nutrition science estimates this with the Mifflin-St Jeor equation, published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition in 1990. A 2005 systematic review in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association compared the common predictive formulas and found Mifflin-St Jeor the most reliable, estimating resting metabolic rate within 10 per cent of laboratory measurements in more people than any other equation tested.

You can work it out by hand, but running your height, weight, age and activity level through a free TDEE calculator takes under a minute and returns the maintenance figure everything else depends on.

Suppose that figure is 2,200 calories. Eat around 2,200 and your weight broadly holds. Eat meaningfully less, consistently, and it falls. Every calorie-based plan that works is built on this one number - which is exactly why borrowed diet charts fail so often. They skip the step where you find it.

Subtract like an adult, not a crash dieter

Search this question and the internet answers with round numbers - 1,200, 1,500, 1,800 - as though bodies came in three sizes. Round numbers are memorable. Yours is unlikely to be one of them.

Once you know your maintenance number, many people aim to eat about 500 calories below it. The Mayo Clinic notes that cutting roughly 500 calories a day tends to produce about 0.45 kg (one pound) of loss a week for most people. Bodies aren't spreadsheets, though. Hormones, sleep, water retention and how faithfully the deficit actually happens all move the result. If your maintenance works out to 2,200, a 500-calorie deficit lands intake near 1,700 - not the 1,200 a forwarded chart demands, and not 2,000, which barely moves the needle.

The temptation is to cut more, but larger deficits carry tradeoffs. Harvard Health advises that intake should not fall below 1,200 calories a day for women or 1,500 for men except under the supervision of a health professional, because very low intakes make adequate nutrition difficult. Severe deficits also tend to collapse - hunger wins, the plan ends, the weight often returns. A moderate deficit you can hold for six months beats a heroic one you abandon by Friday. In practice, 500 calories is one course, not one meal: the second helping of rice, the evening fried snack, the mindless biscuits alongside tea. And spending the calories you do eat on food that keeps you full - dal, eggs, curd, vegetables - can make the gap far easier to live with.

Why 'moderately active' is India's favourite fiction

The activity level you select is where most calculations quietly go wrong. TDEE multiplies your basal rate by how much you move, and people are generous with themselves here.

The reference numbers are sobering. The ICMR-National Institute of Nutrition’s 2020 guidelines put the energy requirement of a sedentary Indian man at about 2,110 calories a day and a sedentary woman at about 1,660 - figures revised downward from 2010 by 210 and 240 calories respectively, partly because the assumed activity of the reference Indian fell. Those numbers dropped because the average day did: more desk, more screen, less field. The same tables put a man doing heavy physical work at about 3,470 calories - a gap of more than 1,300 calories between him and his desk-bound cousin. Activity is not a footnote in this calculation; it is a third of it. The point is to enter yours truthfully, not aspirationally.

So if your day is a nine-hour chair, a two-wheeler commute and a thirty-minute evening walk, the honest setting is sedentary or lightly active - not moderate. Be honest about the walk, too: it counts, but it counts less than it feels. Even a genuine 10,000-step day burns roughly 300 to 500 calories for most adults, which a single evening snack can quietly cancel. Selecting “moderately active” out of optimism can inflate your estimated burn by a few hundred calories, and you will faithfully eat your way through a deficit that never existed. When in doubt, some people pick the lower level and adjust upward if weight falls faster than expected. The error is cheap in that direction and expensive in the other.

The kitchen is where deficits go to die

Then there is the counting itself. In a landmark New England Journal of Medicine study, people who insisted they could not lose weight on a low-calorie diet turned out to be under-reporting what they ate by an average of 47 per cent - and over-reporting their physical activity by 51 per cent. They were not lying. Estimating intake is genuinely hard, and the errors run in one direction.

Indian kitchens raise the difficulty. Fat carries nine calories per gram, so one tablespoon of oil in the tadka is roughly 120 uncounted calories - and most home dishes see more than one tablespoon. Ghee on the roti. Sugar dissolved across a day of chai. The handful of chivda at six, the prasad, the “just one” mithai because someone’s cousin got engaged. None of it feels like eating; all of it is energy. This is not a case against home food, which usually beats anything arriving in a delivery bag. It is a case for counting the invisible parts, because your body counts them whether you do or not.

Your number has an expiry date

One thing borrowed charts never mention: the target moves. As you lose weight, there is less of you to run, so your daily burn falls too. The 500-calorie gap you set at 85 kg may have shrunk to almost nothing by 78 kg. What looks like a mysterious plateau is often just a stale number, and the fix is not to eat dramatically less - it is to recalculate at your current weight and reset the target. Doing this after every four to five kilos keeps the maths honest. It is also why “it worked last year” is not evidence for this year.

Keep expectations calibrated too. Any calculator built on Mifflin-St Jeor - TDEE.is included - produces an estimate - within about 10 per cent of reality, not a laboratory reading. The number is best read as a starting hypothesis, with three or four weeks on the weighing scale to confirm or correct it. And if the scale refuses to move despite genuinely consistent tracking, or if you live with a condition such as diabetes or a thyroid disorder, take the question to a doctor or a registered dietitian rather than cutting deeper.

The 1,500-calorie chart your colleague swears by was written for nobody in particular. Your number is already written into your height, your weight, your age and the shape of your day. A borrowed calorie target is a rumour. Your own is arithmetic - and the arithmetic takes a minute.

(Note: This article has been written by the Brand Desk.)