Find your recommended daily calorie intake for safe, science-backed weight loss and get an estimated timeline to reach your target weight.
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Your body expends a certain amount of energy (calories) every day just to maintain its current weight. This total budget is known as your Total Daily Energy Expenditure (TDEE). If you consume fewer calories than your TDEE, your body is forced to draw on stored fat reserves to meet its energy demands. This difference is known as a calorie deficit.
For safe, sustainable fat loss, clinical guidelines recommend a deficit of 500 calories below your TDEE. This deficit size yields a weight reduction of approximately 0.45kg per week. Larger deficits can trigger muscle wasting and slow your thyroid hormones, causing your metabolism to plateau.
Many weight loss programs advocate for rapid calorie cuts (such as diets below 1,000 calories/day). While these result in immediate drops on the scale, they are clinically unsustainable. The weight lost during extreme diets is mostly water and skeletal muscle, not body fat.
When the body senses extreme starvation, it reduces thyroxine levels, slowing your BMR to conserve energy. This adaptive response makes it very easy to regain all the lost weight (and more) as soon as you resume normal eating habits. Safe weight management is a gradual process.