How To Set Your Calorie Deficit For Fat Loss - Step by Step Guide
HOW TO SET YOUR CALORIE DEFICIT FOR FAT LOSS:
A STEP-BY-STEP GUIDE
Written by Jonathan Fletcher
You found this article because you want to know the best way to set your calorie deficit for fat loss.
You’re in luck because helping people get in the best shape of their lives is our full-time job, and we’ve helped hundreds of people lose fat.
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Ok, back to the topic…
Since you already know that a calorie deficit is the only way to lose fat, I won’t waste your valuable time trying to convince you of that fact.
In this article, we’ll dig into setting the calorie deficit for fat loss that’s best for you. If you want the short and sweet version, this part is for you:
HOW TO SET YOUR CALORIE DEFICIT FOR WEIGHT LOSS
How To Find Your TDEE (less accurate but fast)
Step 1: Figure out your Basal Metabolic Rate with an online BMR calculator
Step 2: Multiply your BMR by an activity multiplier - The result = your TDEE
Sedentary - BMR x 1.2
Light Exercise - BMR x 1.375
Moderate Exercise 3-5 times a week - BMR x 1.55
Very active / Heavy Exercise 6-7 times a week - BMR x 1.725
Athlete who trains 2 times per day - BMR x 1.9
Step 3: Calculate your calorie deficit
Aggressive / Not sustainable - TDEE x .8 (20% deficit)
Conservative / Sustainable - TDEE x .85 (15% deficit)
How To Find Your TDEE (more accurate but harder)
Step 1: Weigh yourself first thing in the morning.
Step 2: Log how many calories you eat every day for 5-7 days without changing your habits.
Step 3: Weigh yourself at the end to verify your weight is within 1-2lbs.
Step 4: Add the total calories you ate and divide by the number of days you logged.
Step 5: Calculate your calorie deficit.
Aggressive / Not sustainable - TDEE x .8 (20% deficit)
Conservative / Sustainable - TDEE x 85 (15% deificit)
Ok, with the “Too Long, Didn’t Read” version out of the way, let’s dig in so you can get the best results possible.
WHY YOUR TDEE MATTERS FOR FAT LOSS
The first and most important step in setting your calories for fat loss is finding your current Total Daily Energy Expenditure.
We call this your TDEE for short. Your TDEE is the sum of all of the calories that it takes to maintain your current body weight.
The wild thing about your TDEE is that it’s unique to you, and no one else. Let me show you why this matters for setting your calorie deficit with a little story.
Tina and Tabitha were born in the same hospital on the same day. They lived on the same street, had the same color hair, and went to the same schools until the day they both left for college. Even stranger than that, they were the same height and weight as each other.
What wasn’t the same were their genetics, their habits, their activity levels, and their body compositions.
Tina came from a family of athletes. Her dad played football in college, and her mom was a former gymnast. From the day she was able to walk, Tina was kicking a soccer ball. She made varsity her sophomore year and was the captain of the team by the time she was a junior.
Every week Tina lifted weights and trained with the team. At home, her family cooked most of their own food with most of the ingredients coming from the perimeter of the grocery store. Things like meat, vegetables, fruit, eggs, dairy, and plenty of foods like rice, beans, and potatoes.
Tina was in great physical shape, and it showed. She was lean, had visible muscles, and looked athletic. She weighed about 140 pounds and had very little extra body fat.
If Tina were to count how many calories she ate most days, it would be in the range of 2500-2700 just to maintain her weight at her level of activity. That means her TDEE is about ~2600 calories per day.
Tabitha’s gift was less in the athletic arena and more in the math realm. She advanced to algebra before anyone in her middle school, was in AP trig by the time she was a sophomore, and she was the captain of the All-State Mathlete team of her high school. Major overacheiver stuff.
Afternoons, nights, and weekends were mostly spent studying and solving equations in her room. Tabitha’s mom was a single parent and the sole breadwinner for the family. With understandably little time to cook, a typical menu for the day was: cereal for breakfast, a sandwich and chips for lunch, frozen pizza or spaghetti for dinner, and a couple of Little Debbie-type snacks mixed in during the day.
Tabitha’s lack of physical activity and years of eating the Standard American Diet (SAD for short) resulted in a completely different body composition than Tina's.
Even though Tina and Tabitha both weighed 140 lbs, Tina was fit, trim, and covered in visible muscle tone. Tabitha on the other hand was soft, carried more body fat, and her waist was 6” bigger around than Tina’s.
Tina and Tabitha had completely different body compositions.
If Tabitha were to calculate how many calories she ate most days, it would be about 1800-2000, which maintained her weight at 140 lbs. That means her TDEE is ~1900 calories per day.
I told you that story to point out two things.
1 - Body composition is not the same thing as body weight
Tina and Tabitha both weigh 140 pounds, but look completely different.
You’re trying to use a calorie deficit to lose weight. I get it. But what you’re really trying to do is lose fat. You want to look fit and athletic, not soft and fluffy.
Instead of chasing a goal weight, chase the best body composition that you can achieve.
*Spoiler alert* - If you do things right with your training and nutrition, you’ll probably weigh more than you think when you’re at your ideal body composition.
Body Composition
I’m the same weight in both photos 🤯
Check out our two-part podcast series on body composition below to learn more:
2 - Calorie calculation formulas have their limitations
You can see from the example of Tina and Tabitha that genetics, lifestyle, food choices, and training have a massive effect on your metabolism, weight, body composition, and therefore your calorie needs (TDEE).
What I’m saying is, nutrition is highly individual. It’s the reason our 1:1 Nutrition Coaching is so effective.
Here’s what Amanda had to say:
“I’m the strongest I’ve ever been! Strong in the sense that I can lift with the best of them, but also I am mentally strong enough to take on a challenge within myself, or to take on any nutritional challenges thrown my way. So just wanted to thank you for doing what you do and tell you you’re doing it well!!! So very grateful to have you as coaches.” - Amanda
Don’t get discouraged by comparing yourself to what someone else eats in a day, or by thinking that your metabolism is “broken”. It’s not. Everyone can lose fat and improve their body composition. I promise.
HOW TO FIND YOUR TDEE FOR FAT LOSS
The Fast Way
The More Accurate Way
The Fast and Less Accurate Way To Find Your TDEE
I’m going to give you two ways to find your TDEE, which will then open the door to setting your individualized calorie deficit for fat loss.
The fastest way to find your TDEE is to use your fingers to google the “Mifflin-St. Jeor Formula” calculator.
This is a widely accepted formula to determine the biggest part of your TDEE which is called your “Basal Metabolic Rate” or BMR.
Your BMR is based on your Sex, Age, Height, and Weight.
Think of it as the number of calories it takes to keep you alive even if you just lay in bed all day.
From there, we need to add in calories to account for your daily activity (remember the difference between Tina and Tabitha?). We do that with an activity multiplier. Take your BMR and multiply it by the one of these that fits you best:
Are you sedentary like Tabitha? BMR x 1.2
Do you do light exercise 1-3 times a week? BMR x 1.375
Do you do moderate exercise 3-5 times a week? BMR x 1.55
Are you very active and exercise 6-7 times a week? BMR x 1.725
Are you an athlete who exercises 2 times per day like Tina? BMR x 1.9
⚠️ WARNING ⚠️ - Most people overestimate how active they are and how intensely they exercise. When in doubt, be conservative in your estimation. You are not Michael Phelps or Serena Williams.
The number you came up with after you used your activity multiplier is your estimated TDEE.
Easy enough right? For some people, this number is “good enough”. It’s certainly a starting point.
But there are drawbacks and limitations to this method.
For starters, it doesn’t know much about “you”. It doesn’t know your previous experience with dieting, and it doesn’t take into account how many calories you’re eating now.
It doesn’t take into account your body fat percentage, genetics, and habits. All of these things can have a massive impact on your TDEE.
So while BMR & TDEE calculators are a convenient shortcut, they don’t always tell the whole story. We’ve learned from working with hundreds of clients in the 10 years that we’ve been coaching that these calculators can routinely be off by 10-25%.
The Most Accurate Way To Find Your TDEE
Now let’s talk about the more accurate way to find your TDEE that doesn’t use a calculator, but does require more effort on your part.
The benefit of the extra effort is that this method is based on YOU, so the results can be trusted. Here’s what you need to do, step by step.
1. Get a cheap digital food scale like THIS.2. Get a smartphone or a computer and download MyFitnessPal or go to www.myfitnesspal.com and set up an account.
3. Read THIS article we wrote about how to use MyFitnessPal.
4. Weigh yourself first thing in the morning, and record it.
5. WITHOUT CHANGING YOUR DIET, accurately log EVERYTHING you eat and drink for 5-7 days. The point is to find out how many calories you’re eating now. If you’re feeling guilty about your choices and choose not to log a few handfuls of candy that you eat, you’re not going to get an accurate estimate of your TDEE. Be hones.
6. Maintain your “normal” physical activity and exercise during these days also. Don’t do this when you’re sick or when you decide that you’re going to start running 5 miles a day when you’ve not been doing it previously.
7. After 5-7 days of logging your food, take your body weight again and record it. Add up the total number of calories that you ate all week, and divide it by the number of days that you logged. For example, if you logged for 5 days and ate a total of 10,000 calories, your average daily calories were 2,000 Calories.
Assuming that your body weight stayed about the same (plus or minus a pound) and you did an honest and accurate job logging your food, you now have an accurate measure of your TDEE (2,000 in our example above). Since this is based on an average, the more days you log, the better your estimate will be.
If you weigh yourself at the end of your food logging days and you’ve gained or lost a bunch of weight (2-5lbs) I would recommend trying again. What else ya got to do? I mean, you’re going to be eating anyway right?
HOW TO SET THE BEST CALORIE DEFICIT FOR FAT LOSS
Ok friend, by doing what you just did, you now have a really good idea of what your TDEE is. Now for the fun part. The part you’ve been waiting for. The part where you start losing body fat by getting into a calorie deficit.
We’ll create that calorie deficit by setting your calorie goal at a number lower than your TDEE.
As you stick with eating in a calorie deficit, your body will have no choice but to burn your body fat to make up the energy difference. That’s good news right?
It’s commonly accepted that 1lb of body fat has about 3,500 calories worth of energy in it. What that means is that for every 3,500 of calorie deficit you create (and stick with consistently), you’ll lose 1lb of body fat.
Now, I don’t know if you’ve noticed… but your body isn’t as controlled and exact as an experiment conducted in a lab. Your weight fluctuates pretty wildly during the week because of a lot of different factors like water retention, sodium and hydration levels, changing activity levels, menstruation, rest and recovery, and the contents of your digestive tract. TMI?
My point is that even though a pound of fat has 3,500 calories in it, you might not lose exactly one pound for every 3,500 calories that you cut. Don’t get discouraged or give up.
You have the freedom to create as big of a calorie deficit as you want when you lose fat. But after helping hundreds of people lose a lot of fat, I have some advice to set you up for success and avoid failing.
Many people jump straight to the goal of trying to lose 1 pound per week. It’s a nice round number that people tend to like.
To do that they need to cut 3,500 calories per week, or 500 calories per day right off the top of their TDEE.
This could be a recipe for disaster, and here’s why.
The number one thing that’ll derail your fat loss progress is a lack of consistency in sticking with your calorie deficit, or “falling off” your diet altogether for days or weeks at a time.
Guess what’s highly likely to lead to both of those two things happening?
Being hangry.
Don’t get me wrong, hunger is a normal part of fat loss. But as the size of your calorie deficit grows, so will your hunger.
Your body doesn’t want you to lose weight, and it’s not afraid to use hunger to try and stop you.
If you’re a 250lb man or a 200lb woman and you cut 500 calories per day out of your diet, you might be ok. Since you started with a fairly high TDEE, you’re still eating a good amount of food.
If you’re a 150lb woman with a TDEE of 1800 calories, or a 185lb man at 2000 and you’re trying to lose fat, cutting your calories by 500 calories per day is going to catch up with you quickly. Even your shoe will start looking like a snack before long.
Instead of using a blanket policy like “cut 500 calories per day” to lose a pound per week, here’s what to do.
HOW TO SET A MODERATELY AGGRESSIVE CALORIE DEFICIT FOR FAT LOSS
If you’re trying to lose fat as fast as possible, (in a somewhat sustainable way) you’re super committed, you have a healthy relationship with food, and you can tolerate moderate amounts of hunger, here’s what to do.
Take your TDEE from earlier, and multiply it by .20
You just created a 20% calorie deficit, and this is your new calorie goal while you’re losing fat.
Now, let me say something before I go any further. If you fell asleep, wake up!
You don’t have to hit your calories exactly. That’s a load off right? For starters, the calorie count on food labels can be off by as much as 20%. So even if you did hit your calories exactly, who’s to say it’s actually right?
Secondly, missing your calories, by 10, 20, or 30 calories is not going to be the difference between you losing weight or not. Your body is simply not that precise.
With our clients, we help them get within about 50-100 calories of their goal each day because that’s close enough to make amazing progress without overly stressing out.
Ok, so if you choose to use a 20% calorie deficit for fat loss you should be ready to endure some hunger, as well as a little decreased energy and motivation after you are consistent for a few weeks.
Your body wants to preserve body fat, and it will do that by decreasing your unconscious activity and ramping up your hunger.
A good strategy that we take with an aggressive deficit is to plan for periodic increases in calories every 4 weeks to give you a mental and physical break from the deficit.
These aren’t “cheat meals” or “cheat days”. They’re planned days of eating 200-500 calories a day more, done on purpose, and still tracked in your food log.
We also help our clients choose foods that help them stay fuller to keep hunger at bay. Check out the article below for more info.
How to set a conservative calorie deficit for fat loss
For 90+% of our fat loss clients, we use a more conservative calorie deficit.
A conservative deficit is easier to stick with consistently, which is the #1 way to get the best results possible.
You’ll be less hungry, suffer fewer negative effects like decreased mood and energy, your performance in the gym won’t take a hit, and your friends and family won’t have to listen to you whine so much!
To set your conservative calorie deficit for fat loss:
Take your TDEE and multiply it by .85
You just set a 15% calorie deficit for fat loss, and the number you got is your new calorie goal while you’re losing weight.
You might be wondering… “What about other sized calorie deficits like 5% or 10%?”
Great question.
After working with hundreds of people, we wouldn’t recommend really small deficits like 5% or 10% for fat loss.
I mentioned earlier that food labels can be off by as much as 20%. It’s also tough to estimate how many calories are in recipes, and food that you get at a restaurant or your friend's house.
If your calorie deficit is too small, there’s a good chance that all of the inconsistencies I just mentioned could wipe out your deficit altogether.
You’ll be doing all of the work, but not losing any weight. How depressing would that be?
The other reason that we don’t recommend a super small calorie deficit is that your body might just slow down your metabolism by making you subconsciously move less.
Let’s say your 5% calorie deficit is only 125 calories. Your body may just make you fidget a little bit less (125 calories less burned over the course of the day), which would effectively also wipe out your calorie deficit.
Your calorie deficit needs to be large enough to give you some wiggle room for errors in logging, and large enough that you outpace your body’s ability to decrease your subconscious activity in an effort to slow down your calorie burn.
In our opinion, a 15% calorie deficit is the sweet spot for most people unless you have a large amount of weight to lose.
Congrats! You just set your calorie deficit for fat loss.
HOW TO MONITOR YOUR PROGRESS WHEN YOU’RE IN A CALORIE DEFICIT
Now that you’re eating in a calorie deficit consistently, it’s time to make sure it’s working.
Here are the 3 ways you’re going to know if your calorie deficit is working.
1 - Your Weight
A lot of people get discouraged and give up on their diet because they think they aren’t losing weight.
They’ll hop on the scale every Friday and see that the number isn’t all that different from last Friday, they think they’ll never be able to lose weight and they give up.
Remember earlier when I mentioned that your weight fluctuates from day to day? Those fluctuations can easily be 1-5lbs from one day to the next! It’s completely normal.
What if you had a big meal or a salty entree on Thursday night that made your weight spike up a couple pounds? If you only weigh yourself once a week you’d be missing the big picture and give up.
Do this instead…
Weigh yourself every morning at the same time wearing just your skibbies. At the end of the week, add up all 7 of your daily weights and then divide by 7.
This is your average weight for the week, and it’s much more reliable to compare your weekly averages to see if you’re truly making progress or not.
2 - Body Measurements
Another important way to measure your progress is to measure yourself.
Get yourself a flexible tape measure, and take notes.
Use the guide below to take your body measurements every 2-4 weeks.
Keep a note in your phone so you can keep up with your progress.
3 - Progress Pictures
Last but not least, take progress photos of yourself. I know, I know, you're self-conscious and don't want to take them.
Do it anyway. You'll be glad you did when you look like a superhero this time next year. Use the guide below to see how to take great progress photos every 4 weeks.
Don't try to compare your photos month to month by swiping through your phone. You'll never be able to get a good picture of your progress.
Use an app like Photogrid on your phone to put those suckers side by side and you'll really see what's going on.
I hope you found this article helpful.
If you want to dig into how to set your Macros (protein, carbs, and fat) for fat loss, click the button below for another killer article.
If you’re struggling to reach your health and fitness goals, we can help.
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P.S. If you’re looking for help building your healthy grocery list, we have you covered. Our FREE Grocery and Meal Prep guide takes the mystery out of what to buy, and how to build healthy meals your whole family will love. Download it HERE.
