To lose one pound per week, you need to create a calorie deficit of roughly 500 calories per day. That deficit can come from eating less, moving more, or a combination of both. The specific number of calories you should burn depends on how much you eat and how much energy your body uses at rest, which varies significantly from person to person.
The 500-Calorie Deficit Starting Point
The widely cited rule is that 3,500 calories equals about one pound of body fat, so cutting 500 calories per day should produce one pound of weight loss per week. The Mayo Clinic notes this math doesn’t hold perfectly for everyone, because your metabolism adjusts as you lose weight. Still, 500 calories per day is a useful starting target. A pace of one to two pounds per week is what the CDC considers gradual, steady weight loss, and people who lose at that rate are more likely to keep the weight off than those who drop pounds faster.
That 500-calorie gap doesn’t all need to come from exercise. If you eat 250 fewer calories and burn an extra 250 through activity, you hit the same deficit with less strain on either side. Most people find this split more sustainable than trying to exercise away 500 calories every day or slashing their food intake dramatically.
How to Find Your Personal Calorie Baseline
Before you can create a deficit, you need to know how many calories your body burns without any intentional exercise. This is your basal metabolic rate (BMR), the energy your body uses just to keep you alive: breathing, circulating blood, maintaining body temperature. The most widely used formula for estimating BMR is the Mifflin-St Jeor equation:
- Women: (10 × weight in kg) + (6.25 × height in cm) − (5 × age in years) − 161
- Men: (10 × weight in kg) + (6.25 × height in cm) − (5 × age in years) + 5
For a 35-year-old woman who weighs 170 pounds (77 kg) and stands 5’5″ (165 cm), that works out to about 1,434 calories per day just at rest. A 35-year-old man at 200 pounds (91 kg) and 5’10” (178 cm) would get roughly 1,833 calories per day.
But you don’t just lie in bed all day. To get your total daily energy expenditure, you multiply your BMR by an activity factor:
- Sedentary (desk job, little exercise): BMR × 1.2
- Lightly active (light exercise 1–3 days/week): BMR × 1.375
- Moderately active (exercise 3–5 days/week): BMR × 1.55
- Active (hard exercise 6–7 days/week): BMR × 1.725
- Very active (intense daily exercise or physical job): BMR × 1.9
Using the woman from the example above with a lightly active lifestyle, her total daily burn comes to about 1,972 calories. To lose one pound per week, she’d aim to consume around 1,472 calories per day, or keep her intake steady and burn an extra 500 through exercise, or split the difference.
How Many Calories Common Exercises Actually Burn
Exercise scientists measure activity intensity using METs, or metabolic equivalents. One MET equals the energy you burn sitting still, roughly 1 calorie per kilogram of body weight per hour. An activity rated at 5 METs burns five times that amount. Here’s what that looks like in practice for someone weighing 170 pounds (77 kg):
- Walking at a moderate pace (3–3.5 mph): about 3.5 METs, burning roughly 270 calories per hour
- Jogging (5 mph): about 8 METs, burning roughly 615 calories per hour
- Cycling at a moderate effort: about 6 METs, burning roughly 460 calories per hour
- Swimming laps, moderate effort: about 6 METs, burning roughly 460 calories per hour
A heavier person burns more calories doing the same activity because they’re moving more mass. A lighter person burns fewer. This is why two people can do the same 30-minute jog and get very different calorie totals. To calculate your own estimate, multiply the MET value by your weight in kilograms by the number of hours spent on the activity.
Why Your Deficit Stops Working Over Time
If you’ve ever hit a weight loss plateau after a few successful months, metabolic adaptation is the reason. As you lose weight, your body requires fewer calories to function. A smaller body simply burns less energy. But the slowdown goes beyond simple physics. Research from the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases shows that metabolism, appetite, and calorie expenditure all shift during a weight loss phase, meaning the same 500-calorie deficit that worked in month one produces less results by month four.
This is why the old “3,500 calories equals one pound” rule breaks down over time. It treats your metabolism as a fixed number, when it’s actually a moving target. The NIH developed a Body Weight Planner tool that accounts for these metabolic changes and gives more realistic timelines for weight loss goals. In practical terms, you may need to reassess your calorie intake and activity level every few weeks rather than setting one number and sticking with it indefinitely.
Strength Training Changes the Equation
Cardio gets the most attention for calorie burning, but resistance training has a unique advantage: it raises your resting metabolic rate. A study published in the International Journal of Exercise Science found that sedentary women who did six weeks of moderate resistance training increased their resting calorie burn by an average of 247 calories per day. That’s a meaningful bump, nearly half of a 500-calorie daily deficit, happening automatically without additional exercise.
Interestingly, this increase in resting metabolism wasn’t fully explained by gains in muscle mass. The women in the study didn’t show significant changes in body composition or fat-free mass during those six weeks, yet their metabolic rates still climbed. Researchers believe resistance training triggers metabolic changes beyond just adding muscle tissue, possibly through increased energy demands for muscle repair and elevated nervous system activity after workouts. The takeaway: even before you see visible muscle changes, your body is burning more calories at rest if you’re lifting weights consistently.
Minimum Calorie Floors to Stay Safe
There’s a limit to how aggressive your deficit should be. Harvard Health Publishing sets the floor at 1,200 calories per day for women and 1,500 calories per day for men. Dropping below these levels without medical supervision risks nutrient deficiencies, muscle loss, fatigue, and metabolic slowdown that makes future weight loss harder. If your calculated deficit puts you below these numbers, it’s better to increase the exercise side of the equation rather than cut food further.
Very low calorie diets also tend to backfire behaviorally. Severe restriction increases hunger hormones and makes binge eating more likely, which can erase a week’s worth of deficit in a single day. A moderate deficit you can maintain for months will always outperform an extreme one you abandon after three weeks.
Putting the Numbers Together
Here’s a practical framework. Calculate your BMR using the Mifflin-St Jeor equation, then multiply by your activity factor to get your total daily calorie burn. Subtract 500 from that number to find your daily calorie target for losing about one pound per week, or subtract 1,000 for two pounds per week (only if you stay above the minimum calorie floors). Check that your target doesn’t dip below 1,200 calories for women or 1,500 for men.
Split the deficit between diet and exercise in whatever ratio feels manageable. Add two to three sessions of resistance training per week to protect your resting metabolic rate. Recalculate every 10 to 15 pounds lost, because your baseline calorie needs will have dropped. Track your weight over weeks, not days, since daily fluctuations from water retention, digestion, and hormones can mask real progress or create false alarms.