Calorie deficit for men
Most men have a maintenance between 2,400 and 3,000 kcal, which makes a workable deficit 400–700 kcal a day and leaves intake around 2,000–2,500 kcal. Call it 0.4–0.6 kg (1–1.3 lb) a week, and get your own maintenance figure rather than using the average.
A higher maintenance and more lean mass genuinely do buy room that a smaller person does not have. Most men who fail at this fail by spending all of it at once.
The room is real; spending it all is the error
A 700 kcal deficit against a 2,900 kcal maintenance is 24% below — comfortably inside the sensible range. The same 700 kcal against a maintenance of 1,800 is 39%, which is a different thing entirely. More lean mass helps too: there is more muscle to defend and more fat available to fund the gap, so a larger absolute deficit costs less in lean tissue, provided protein and resistance training are doing their jobs.
What goes wrong is reading that room as licence. A 1,200 kcal deficit is still 40% below a 3,000 kcal maintenance, and the failure mode is not a slow fade but an abrupt stop: four days at 1,200 under followed by a weekend 1,500 over averages out to roughly nothing. Strength also falls first and fastest on a deep cut, which removes the one stimulus that was protecting your muscle. A 500 kcal deficit held for 20 weeks beats 1,000 held for five, every time — why bigger is not better.
Alcohol is the input that never gets logged
If the food diary looks honest and the scale will not move, start here.
| Drink | Roughly |
|---|---|
| Pint of 4% lager | 170 kcal |
| Pint of 5% lager | 215 kcal |
| Pint of 5.5% craft IPA | 240 kcal |
| 330 ml bottle of 5% beer | 140 kcal |
| 175 ml glass of 13% wine | 160 kcal |
| Double spirit with tonic | 170 kcal |
Five pints is about 1,100 kcal — two full days of a 500 kcal deficit, gone before the walk home. Two such evenings a week comes to 2,200 kcal, enough to cancel a 300 kcal daily deficit across all seven days while the food diary stays immaculate.
It goes unlogged for three reasons. It is not food, so it does not get entered. Rounds are remembered as rounds rather than as units. And the drinks are only part of the bill: the reliable sequence is the late food that arrives with the last pint, a disinhibited appetite the next day, a worse night’s sleep and a session skipped.
The fix is not abstinence. It is to decide the week’s drinking in advance and fund it: four pints on Saturday is 900 kcal, which 130 kcal a day across the week covers — as long as you did the covering beforehand rather than hoping.
The reflex is to add cardio. Food is the easier lever
Asked to lose 10 kg (22 lb), men reliably add training rather than subtract food. It is the harder of the two levers.
Forty-five minutes of running at 10 km/h (6 mph) for an 85 kg (187 lb) man is around 600 kcal gross, of which perhaps 550 is genuinely extra, since you would have burned the rest sitting still. A flat white and a pastry replaces it in four minutes. It also has to happen four or five times a week indefinitely, and it competes with recovery, whereas eating 400 kcal less requires no free hour at all. Deliberate exercise is the smallest component of what maintenance is made of for most people, which is the underlying reason.
Then there is compensation: appetite rises, incidental movement often drops for the rest of the day, and the watch’s figure invites you to eat it back.
So keep training, but give it the right job. Resistance work is what keeps the weight you lose from being muscle; cardio earns its place on health and as a modest top-up, not as the deficit itself.
Protein scaled to lean mass, not scale weight
The standard 1.6–2.2 g per kg holds well until body fat is high, at which point scale weight inflates the target. A 115 kg (254 lb) man at roughly 32% body fat is carrying about 78 kg (172 lb) of lean mass. Two grams per kilo of scale weight is 230 g of protein a day — about 40% of a 2,200 kcal intake, and more plate space than most people will concede. The same multiplier against lean mass gives 125–170 g, which protects muscle just as effectively. If you do not know your body fat, scale to a realistic goal weight instead; it lands in much the same place.
Lean men go the other way. At 10–12% body fat in a sustained deficit the top of the range is the protective end rather than the ambitious one: there is less fat available to fund the gap, so the body is quicker to take the difference out of muscle.
None of this is a different method — it is the same deficit with a different set of numbers. Pick 20% of maintenance, recheck it every 4.5 kg (10 lb), count what you drink, and let training do what it is actually good at. More on running a deficit.
General information, not medical advice.