No gimmicks, no meal plans to buy. Two steps. Work out how many calories you burn, then eat fewer than that.
Work out your TDEE (Total Daily Energy Expenditure). That is just the number of calories your body burns in a day. Use the calculator below.
Eat fewer calories than that. Do it for months, not days.
That is the whole thing. Everything else on this page is just helping you do those two steps in real life.
Step 1 · Your calories
Your TDEE (Total Daily Energy Expenditure) is how many calories you burn in a day. Fill this in to get yours.
Maintain your weight
—
calories a day
To lose fat, eat about
—
calories a day
Uses the Mifflin-St Jeor equation. A 500-calorie daily deficit loses roughly half a kilo (one pound) of fat a week. These are estimates. Real life fine-tunes them. Weigh yourself over weeks, not days, and adjust.
Why this always works
This is physics, not opinion.
Your body runs on energy from food, measured in calories. There are only two outcomes:
Eat under your TDEE
You will lose fat.
Every day you eat less than you burn, your body pulls the difference from stored fat. (Plus a little muscle if your protein is too low.)
Eat over your TDEE
You will gain.
Extra energy has to go somewhere, so your body stores it. It does not matter how "clean" or "healthy" the food was.
Don't track, and you'll drift over without noticing. That is the whole thing.
Step 2 · How to actually eat under it
Knowing the number is easy. Eating under it is the hard part. Here is the simplest way that works:
Cook all your own meals. When someone else cooks, you have no idea what is in it. When you cook, you do.
Weigh everything before you eat it. A cheap kitchen scale is the single best tool for losing fat. Guessing is where people go wrong.
Short on time and don't want to cook much? Then learn to enjoy simple food for three months and see how much weight you lose. You do not need a big shopping list. A few cheap staples cover it:
A sample day
Built around those staples and sized to the fat-loss target from your calculator above. Swap in foods you like better as long as the totals stay close.
Numbers are approximate. The point is the shape of the day, not hitting it to the gram.
Protein · so you lose fat, not muscle
In a calorie deficit, enough protein is what keeps the weight you lose coming from fat instead of muscle. A simple target is about 2 grams of protein per kilo of bodyweight (anywhere from 1.6 to 2.2 is fine).
Enter your details above and this fills in for you.
You would not really get all your protein from chicken. Spread it across the foods above. This is just a yardstick for how much protein actually looks like on a plate.
That is it. You are either eating under your number or you are not.
The maths is universal. The method is yours to figure out. Want the longer why? Read the science.
DM Phil to join the cult Read the science →