How to set a calorie deficit you can stick to

Why 500 calories is the wrong answer

The 500 calorie rule comes from tidy maths. A kilo of body fat holds about 7,700 calories, so 500 a day for a week is roughly half a kilo. The maths is fine. The problem is that it gives the same number to two very different people.

If you maintain your weight on 1,700 calories, cutting 500 is a 29% drop. You will be hungry, cold and fed up by week three. If you maintain on 3,100, the same 500 is 16%, which barely does anything and takes most of a year.

The rate that works

Aim to lose about 0.7% of your bodyweight a week, and never more than a kilo. At 90 kg that is a bit over 600 g. At 60 kg it is about 420 g. One rule, two different numbers.

Go faster and two things happen. You lose more muscle along with the fat, and the diet gets hard enough that you quit. Fast fat loss is not better fat loss if week six never happens.

Where the floor is

Three limits are worth keeping no matter what the maths says. Do not go more than 25% under maintenance. Do not eat under 1,500 calories as a man or 1,200 as a woman. Do not lose more than a kilo a week.

Below those you cannot fit your protein in, let alone your vitamins, and the training that is meant to protect your muscle stops being possible.

Panko says

A slow diet you finish beats a fast one that stops in March. Nobody was ever annoyed about losing the fat in 18 weeks instead of 12.

The three weeks where nothing happens

The scale is a noisy tool. It weighs your body plus the water in it, the food in your gut, and how salty last night was. Those move by a kilo in a day, which is more than a whole week of fat loss.

So before you change anything, make sure you have stalled at all.

1. Weigh yourself daily, at the same time, after the toilet and before food.
2. Compare this week's average with last week's. One morning against another tells you nothing.
3. If the average has been flat for three weeks on the same food, that is a stall. Two weeks is not enough to know.

Panko does that averaging for you. You log a weight, it draws the weekly trend line, so you are reading a real direction rather than this morning's number.

What to do about a real stall

Your maintenance drops as you get lighter. There is less of you to carry around, and you move less on low calories. The deficit you set at 82 kg is a smaller deficit at 76 kg. Three fixes, in the order worth trying.

Recalculate before you cut anything

Put your new weight into the calculator. Often your target has drifted by 100 to 150 calories and you never updated it. Panko redoes this every time you log a weigh-in.

Add movement instead of taking away food

Two thousand more steps a day is about 80 to 100 calories, and it does not make dinner smaller. Steps are the part of your day you control most, and the first thing that drops when you are dieting and tired.

Take a diet break

Two weeks at maintenance, on purpose. Not a break from tracking, a break from the deficit. Hunger settles, training picks up, and most people come back losing faster than before. People skip this one, and it is the one that usually works.

The uncomfortable answer

The most common cause of a stall is that the deficit stopped existing. Weekend meals go untracked, oil gets guessed at, the handful of nuts never gets logged, and a 500 calorie deficit turns into 150 without anyone noticing.

That is not a character flaw. It is what happens after eleven weeks of tracking. Log one full week properly, weekend included, before you change your target. Panko lets you log by typing what you ate, saying it, or taking a photo, which is usually the difference between logging the weekend and not.

What to eat, roughly

Protein high, at 2.0 g per kilo, because that is what protects your muscle. Fat around 25% of your calories, enough for your hormones and for food to taste like food. Carbs get the rest, and they are what you train on, so do not cut them to zero because a video told you to.

After that, go for volume. Vegetables, lean protein, fruit and anything with water in it fill you up for very few calories. At week fourteen that matters more than any single food choice.