How many calories should you eat to lose weight?

Here's how to find the number that's actually yours, with two worked examples.

Step 1: find your maintenance calories

Before you can subtract anything, you need a starting point — your maintenance calories, the amount you'd eat to hold your current weight steady. Formulas like Mifflin-St Jeor estimate this from your age, sex, height, weight, and activity level; most calorie-tracking apps (Bocco included) do this calculation for you automatically.

If you'd rather skip the math and just want a rough anchor, the FDA publishes estimated daily calorie needs by age, sex, and activity level: adult women generally need somewhere in the 1,600–2,400 calorie range and adult men somewhere in the 2,000–3,000 range, with younger and more active people sitting toward the top of each range and older, less active people toward the bottom.¹ Treat that as a ballpark, not a diagnosis — it's built for population averages, and your actual number could sit outside it depending on your build.

Step 2: subtract a deficit you can sustain

Once you know roughly what maintenance looks like, the CDC's guidance is to aim for a gradual pace — about 1 to 2 pounds a week — which generally works out to a deficit of 500 to 1,000 calories a day below maintenance.² That's the range worth living in. People who lose weight at this pace tend to keep it off longer than people who crash-diet, mostly because the eating pattern is one they can actually repeat next week, and the one after that.

Going bigger than 1,000 isn't a shortcut — it's a set-up. A steep deficit tends to cost you muscle along with fat, tanks your energy, and makes the diet itself the reason you quit. A number you can hold for months beats a brutal one you abandon in two weeks.

Two worked examples

A moderately active 34-year-old woman, maintenance around 2,000 calories: subtract 500 for a roughly 1 lb/week pace, landing at about 1,500 calories a day. Subtract closer to 700–750 for a faster (but still sustainable) pace, and she's around 1,250–1,300.

A sedentary 45-year-old man, maintenance around 2,200 calories: subtract 500–600 and he's at roughly 1,600–1,700 calories a day — comfortably above the floor below, with room to add activity later rather than cutting further.

Neither of these is "the" answer for anyone else; they're what the math looks like once you plug in real maintenance numbers instead of a headline figure.

Don't go below the floor

There's a point where cutting further stops helping. Most dietitians caution against going below roughly 1,200 calories a day for women or 1,500 for men without medical supervision — under that, it gets genuinely hard to hit your basic nutrient needs from food alone, and very low intakes are harder to sustain and more likely to backfire with a binge or a quit. If your maintenance number is low enough that a reasonable deficit would put you near that floor, that's a conversation for a doctor or registered dietitian, not a diet app.

Building bocco, we've noticed people gravitate toward 1,200 specifically — it's become the internet's shorthand for "a diet number" — even when their actual maintenance is well above what makes that figure a sane deficit for them. If a target feels arbitrary rather than calculated from your own numbers, it probably is.

How Bocco helps

Finding your number is one problem; actually hitting it every day is the other one, and it's usually the harder one. Most people don't fall off because their target was wrong — they fall off because logging every meal by hand got old around week two. Bocco reads your meals from a photo and returns calories and macros in seconds, so you can see where you actually land against your target instead of estimating at the end of the day. If a portion looks off, you correct it in a sentence and the totals recalculate — no re-typing, no spreadsheet.