How To Set Your Calorie Deficit For Fat Loss (AVOID These Mistakes)

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How to set your calorie deficit for fat loss? What’s the best way to determine how much you should eat? Here’s the answer.

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When we look at the hierarchy of what makes up a successful fat loss diet, it’s obvious that calorie intake is the most important factor.

Without a caloric deficit, we can’t maximize fat loss. This has repeatedly been shown in research:

And if you’re interested in learning more in-depth about the energy balance equation I suggest checking out a great blog post by Lyle McDonald at

Now, the question is, how do you determine how many calories you should eat when on a fat loss diet?

And that’s something I want to cover here and point out a few mistakes I see guys make all the time with calories.

Related videos to help you set up your nutrition:
How to estimate calorie maintenance
General fat loss guide
Setting your macros
Best macros for fat loss

The link mentioned in the video:

The truth is that there’s no way to know how your body will react to a specific calorie intake.

There are many things we can’t control when it comes to our energy expenditure such as our NEAT levels which can vary to thousands of calories.

And this means that you need to become good at adjusting calories based on how our body responds.

Sadly, most people don’t do the first nutrition phase properly which in a lot of cases mean they’re not setting themselves up for success.

So in this video, I wanted to share with you guys how the first eight weeks of a diet setup might look like if your goal is to maximize fat loss.

Why eight weeks, why so long? You’ll see.

Let’s start with week 1 and 2. In this phase, you estimate your maintenance calories and then reduce based on the rate of fat loss.

Average reduction is 20%. So if your maintenance is 2500, you reduce by 500 kcal / day on average which would give approx. About 1 lbs/week of loss.

Moving on, we have week 3 and 4. (This is where most people make a mistake)

Week 3, you let the body get used to the lower intake. There might be a delay in fat loss, and also the data is skewed when you drop the carbs because of water weight drop. Often we see huge drops in weight during this week as 1 gram of glycogen holds about 3 grams of water.

The for week 4 give yourself time to become better with food planning and tracking. Also, you might be dealing with Whooshes and Squishy Fat for a week where your fat cells become replaced by water temporarily.

So I don’t recommend using week 3 and four as data to determine if your calories were set correctly despite that fact that you’re technically already in a calorie deficit.

Now, we move on to Week 5 to 8.

These are the four weeks which you will use to determine the first adjustment to your calories.

For this phase, I recommend full tracking with daily weigh-ins to get the weekly average. Additionally, I recommend measuring waist size on Sunday, and 4 point caliper measurement.

Then after this four week period, you can use the data to adjust your calories to match the average rate of weight loss which is going to be anywhere between 0,5 – 1.5% of your BW / Week. (

You might need to reduce 10% more and re-assess again in 4 weeks or just keep it as is.

It’s important to be patient and give yourself enough time in that initial eight-week phase for a productive cut.

Hope you enjoyed! Let me know in the comments if you find this helpful.

Talk soon! – Mario

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