This protein intake calculator does one small job well: it takes your body weight and your goal and hands you a single number in grams to hit each day. That's it. Protein is the one macro almost everyone should set deliberately, because it's the one that protects muscle while you diet, feeds muscle while you build, and keeps you fuller than the same calories from anything else. Below I'll walk through the target ranges the calculator uses, why grams-per-kilogram beats any flat 'everyone eat 100 g' rule, how to hit the number without living on chicken breast, and the handful of myths worth ignoring. The tool above will do the arithmetic; the rest of the page is the reasoning behind it.
TDEE Calculator
Total Daily Energy Expenditure — your real maintenance calories.
Biological sex
BMR formulas use biological sex, not gender identity.
Leave blank if unsure — we'll fall back to Mifflin-St Jeor (the standard).
Most people overestimate this. When in doubt, drop one tier.
Under the hood, a protein intake calculator is barely arithmetic: it multiplies your body weight by a coefficient tied to your goal. If you weigh 70 kg and you're in a fat-loss phase, it might use 2.0 g per kg and return 140 g. That's the whole computation. What makes it useful isn't the multiplication — it's picking the right coefficient, because the sensible range runs from about 1.2 g/kg for a sedentary older adult up to roughly 2.2 g/kg for someone lifting hard in a deep deficit. Get the coefficient right and you're within a rounding error of optimal.
Everything past that is diminishing returns. There's no evidence that eating 3 g/kg builds more muscle than 2.2 g/kg when calories and training are held constant, and there's a real cost: every gram of protein you force in is a gram of carbs or fat you crowd out, and those macros fuel your training and your hormones. So the goal of the calculator isn't to maximize protein. It's to find the lowest number that fully covers your needs, then spend the rest of your calorie budget on food you enjoy.
Daily protein targets by body weight and goal
The core reference. Find your goal row, multiply your body weight by the coefficient, and you have your daily target. The example column uses a 70 kg (154 lb) person so you can sanity-check the math against a real number.
Goal / situation
g protein / kg
g protein / lb
Example (70 kg / 154 lb person)
Fat loss (in a deficit)
1.8 – 2.2
0.82 – 1.0
126 – 154 g
Maintenance / general health
1.4 – 1.8
0.64 – 0.82
98 – 126 g
Muscle gain (lean bulk)
1.6 – 2.0
0.73 – 0.91
112 – 140 g
Adults 50+ (preserving muscle)
1.2 – 1.6
0.55 – 0.73
84 – 112 g
Endurance & strength athletes
1.6 – 2.2
0.73 – 1.0
112 – 154 g
Anchor to the higher end of your range if you train hard, if you're older, or if you're dieting; anchor to the lower end if you're sedentary or in a calorie surplus where protein is easier to spare. If you carry a lot of body fat, read the callout below before you multiply.
Why grams-per-kilogram, and not a flat number
You still see round-number advice everywhere: 'eat 100 grams,' 'a gram per pound,' '30 grams a meal.' The problem is that 100 g is a genuinely high target for a 55 kg woman and a mild one for a 100 kg man — the same number can't be right for both. Protein need scales with the amount of lean tissue you carry and are trying to protect, and body weight is a cheap, close-enough proxy for that. So the honest unit is grams relative to weight, which is exactly what the table and the calculator use.
The 'one gram per pound' rule (roughly 2.2 g/kg) deserves a specific mention because it's so common in lifting circles. It isn't wrong so much as it's the ceiling of the useful range dressed up as a floor. For most people, 2.2 g/kg is more protein than they need for anything short of an aggressive cut — it works, but it also crowds out carbs a lot of lifters would train better with. If you enjoy hitting it and you find high-protein eating easy, there's no harm. Just know you're at the top of the range, not the middle of it. If you want to see how protein fits alongside your fat and carb numbers, our macro calculator lays out the full split; this page is only about the protein slice.
There's also a fairness point buried in the per-kilogram approach. A flat gram target quietly punishes smaller people and under-serves larger ones. Tell a room of mixed body sizes to 'eat 150 grams' and the 55 kg person is now chasing 2.7 g/kg — a genuinely hard, appetite-killing amount — while the 95 kg person is coasting at 1.6 g/kg and might actually be a little low for a hard training block. Scaling to weight makes the target feel roughly the same effort for everyone: a proportion of what you already eat, not an absolute wall you either clear or don't. That's the real reason every credible calculator, including this one, works in grams-per-kilogram rather than a single headline number.
What it takes to actually hit the number
A target on a screen is easy; 150 g on a plate is the real work. Rough protein counts for common foods, so you can build a day in your head:
Chicken breast, cooked — about 31 g per 100 g (a palm-sized fillet is ~35 g).
Greek yogurt (0–2% fat) — about 10 g per 100 g; a 200 g bowl is a painless 20 g.
Whey protein — 20–25 g per scoop, and the cheapest, fastest way to close a 30 g gap at night.
Eggs — about 6 g each, so a 3-egg breakfast is 18 g before you add anything.
Canned tuna or salmon — 20–25 g per small tin, zero cooking.
Firm tofu — about 15 g per 100 g; tempeh is higher at ~19 g if you're plant-based.
Lentils or black beans — 8–9 g per cooked cup, useful but fiber-heavy, so they fill you before they hit the target.
The practical lesson from those numbers: whole-food protein clusters around 20–35 g per serving, so most people need 4–5 protein 'anchors' across the day to reach 130–160 g. If you're consistently short by dinner, a single shake is the least stressful patch.
Distribution matters more than most people think
The calculator gives you a daily total, but the body doesn't build muscle from a daily total — it responds to per-meal doses. Muscle protein synthesis gets fully switched on by roughly 0.4 g/kg of high-quality protein in a sitting (about 25–40 g for most adults), and past that in one meal the extra is largely oxidized for energy rather than routed to muscle. So 40 g at breakfast, 40 g at lunch, and 70 g dumped into dinner is a worse stimulus than the same 150 g spread as four even 35–40 g feedings, even though the daily number is identical.
The practical rule I follow: aim for three or four meals each carrying 25–45 g of protein, spaced across your waking hours. That's it. Don't over-engineer the timing beyond that — the old 'anabolic window' urgency around training has been walked back by the research; total daily intake and even distribution do the heavy lifting. This is doubly worth getting right during a fat-loss phase, where protein is your main defense against losing muscle. If cutting is your goal, the numbers on our TDEE cutting calculator pair naturally with the higher protein rows in the table above.
One meal quietly sabotages more people than any other: breakfast. Cereal, toast, oatmeal, a banana — a typical Western breakfast might carry 5–10 g of protein, which means you're already an hour or two into your day having done nothing for muscle protein synthesis and, more practically, having burned through calories you'll need later to hit your target. Fixing breakfast is usually the single highest-leverage change: eggs, Greek yogurt, a shake, or last night's leftovers can turn a 7 g start into a 30 g one, and it's often the difference between comfortably reaching 140 g and scrambling for it at 9 p.m.
Field note from Sukie
The month I actually weighed my protein instead of guessing
In January 2024 I started a cut at 61 kg and set my protein target at 2.0 g/kg — 122 g a day. I'd been lifting and 'eating high protein' for years, so I assumed I was already there and just needed to drop calories. For the first two weeks I logged honestly with a food scale for the first time in ages, and the average came back at 94 g. Not 122. I'd been overestimating every portion — my 'big' chicken thigh was 90 g cooked, not the 150 I pictured, and my yogurt tub was a 150 g single, not the 200 I'd been logging.
The fix was unglamorous. I added one 24 g whey shake in the afternoon and swapped my usual 2% yogurt for a 0% high-protein version that packed 20 g into the same cup. That alone moved me from 94 to about 138 g without adding a real meal. Eight weeks later I'd lost 3.1 kg and my numbers on the bar hadn't moved down at all — pull-ups and press stayed put — which is exactly what protecting protein during a deficit is supposed to buy you. The lesson wasn't 'eat more protein.' It was 'I was wrong about how much I was already eating,' and only the scale caught it.
— Sukie
The protein myths worth ignoring
Two worries come up constantly, and both are mostly noise for healthy people. The first is that high protein damages your kidneys. In people with normal kidney function, it doesn't — the 'protein is hard on the kidneys' idea comes from advice given to patients who already have kidney disease, where protein is genuinely restricted, and it got wrongly generalized to everyone. If you have diagnosed kidney disease, follow your doctor; if you don't, intakes in the 1.6–2.2 g/kg range have a clean safety record in the literature.
The second myth is that there's some high threshold where extra protein keeps adding muscle. There isn't a useful one. The most-cited evidence here is a 2018 meta-analysis by Morton and colleagues (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28698222/), which pooled 49 studies and found that protein's benefit to muscle and strength gains flattened out at about 1.6 g/kg per day, with a plausible ceiling around 2.2 g/kg for most trainees. That's the entire basis for the ranges in the table — they aren't arbitrary, they're roughly where the science says the returns stop. Eating well past 2.2 g/kg isn't harmful, it's just spending calories that would serve you better as training fuel. If you're using the surplus side of things, the same protein logic sits underneath our TDEE for muscle gain guide, which handles the calorie half of the equation.
“Protein is the macro you set once and then stop worrying about. Hit a sensible gram target most days, spread it across your meals, and let calories do the steering. The people who spin their wheels are almost never the ones eating too little protein — they're the ones who never actually measured what they eat.”
Multiply your body weight in kg by a coefficient for your goal: 1.4–1.8 for general health, 1.6–2.0 for muscle gain, and 1.8–2.2 during fat loss. A 70 kg person lands somewhere between roughly 98 and 154 g depending on which of those they're doing.
Is one gram of protein per pound of body weight necessary?+
Not for most people. One gram per pound is about 2.2 g/kg, which is the top of the useful range, not the requirement. The research suggests benefits flatten around 1.6 g/kg and cap near 2.2 g/kg, so a gram per pound works but is often more than you need outside an aggressive cut.
Should I use my current weight or goal weight in the calculator?+
If you're at a reasonable body fat, use current weight. If you carry a lot of fat, anchor to your goal or target weight instead, because protein need scales with lean mass, not fat mass. Otherwise you'll get an inflated, hard-to-hit number.
Does it matter how I spread protein across the day?+
Yes, moderately. Muscle protein synthesis maxes out at roughly 25–40 g of quality protein per meal, so three or four evenly spaced feedings of that size beat cramming most of your protein into one dinner, even at the same daily total.
Can too much protein hurt my kidneys?+
Not if your kidneys are healthy. The kidney concern comes from advice for people with existing kidney disease and doesn't apply to healthy adults. Intakes in the 1.6–2.2 g/kg range have a strong safety record. If you have diagnosed kidney disease, follow your physician's guidance.
How much protein do older adults need?+
Often more than younger adults relative to activity, because aging muscle responds less efficiently to protein. A range of 1.2–1.6 g/kg helps preserve muscle and independence, spread across meals so each hits at least 25–30 g to overcome that reduced sensitivity.
Do I need a protein powder to hit my target?+
No, but it's the easiest patch. Whole foods can cover any target, yet most people run short by evening; a single 20–25 g shake closes that gap without planning another meal. Powder is a convenience, not a requirement.