Find your calories. Hit your protein. Lose the weight.
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Your maintenance calories (TDEE)
Protein takes more energy to digest than carbs or fat. It also keeps you full longer. Most importantly, it protects your muscle when you are in a calorie deficit. Without enough protein, your body breaks down muscle for fuel. You lose weight but end up soft and weak instead of lean.
The target here is 1.6g to 2.2g per kg of body weight. This is the range backed by most nutrition research for people trying to lose fat and keep muscle.
Complete Step 1 above to get your personalised breakdown.
How active are you right now?
Midpoint of the recommended range. A safe target for most people.
Build your daily plate
Targeting __g of protein. Add foods until you hit your number.
Meat amounts are raw weight (cooking shrinks it by about 25%). Rice, potato and everything else is as you eat it.
Hunger is the main reason diets fail. When you eat less, your body produces hunger signals. Most people can ignore them for a few days. But not for months. Volume eating solves this problem.
Some foods have a lot of calories packed into a small amount. A tablespoon of oil is 120 calories. A small handful of nuts is 200 calories. Other foods have very few calories but take up a lot of space in the stomach. A large plate of vegetables might be 80 calories. One kilogram of watermelon is around 300 calories.
Volume eating means building your plate out of low calorie foods. 250g of rice. 300g of chicken breast. Then fill the rest with vegetables. That is close to 1 kilogram of food in one sitting. Most people struggle to finish it. But it fits inside a normal calorie target.
The stomach does not count calories. It measures volume. Fill it with the right foods, and hunger stays low even inside a deficit. That is the whole method.
Short answer: lift weights. If you only have time for one, pick lifting every single time.
Here is why. In a calorie deficit you lose weight either way. But your body burns muscle along with the fat unless you give it a reason not to. Lifting is that reason. Cardio is not. So two people can lose the exact same weight and end up looking completely different. One soft, one lean.
That is the whole thing in one video:
Cardio still has its place. It is good for your heart and it burns a few extra calories if you want a bigger deficit. But it is not what changes your shape. Do it as a bonus, not as the main event.
When you are in a deficit, your body burns both fat and muscle. Lifting tells it to keep the muscle. The deficit handles the fat. Same weight on the scale, completely different shape.
Three days a week is enough to start. Monday, Wednesday, Friday. Full body each session. You are in and out in under an hour.
Pick one exercise per muscle group, 3 sets of 8 to 12 reps. These five cover everything: Squat (legs), Romanian deadlift (hamstrings and lower back), Bench press (chest), Bent-over row (back), Shoulder press (shoulders).
The one rule that matters: add a little more weight every week. Even 2.5kg. This is called progressive overload. Your body only changes when you give it a reason to. When you can hit 12 reps comfortably, add weight and work back up.
If you can train 5 to 6 days, switch to Push Pull Legs. Push covers chest, shoulders and triceps. Pull covers back and biceps. Legs covers quads, hamstrings and calves. You hit each muscle twice a week which builds faster.
Women, three sessions a week changes your shape, it does not make you bulky. That takes years of very specific effort to achieve.
Read the full beginner's gym guide → Every exercise, every muscle group, sets and reps, plus a programme to start this week.
Read how I went from 128kg to 86kg → The full story: what failed, what finally worked, and what I eat now to keep it off.
Complete Step 1 above to see your summary.