🧠 How to Set Your Calorie Goal for Weight Loss (Without Losing Your Mind)

Frank Sinclair
Oct 21
3 min read

If you’ve ever tried to lose weight before, you’ll have heard the phrase “calorie deficit.” It sounds fancy, but the truth is, it’s just a simple bit of maths that helps you understand why your body loses, gains, or maintains weight - and no, you don’t have to live on chicken and broccoli, or weigh every crumb of bread to make it work.

Let’s break it down together, in plain, simple English.

🔥 What Is a Calorie Deficit?

Here’s the deal: Your body needs a certain number of calories each day to stay alive and function, things like breathing, thinking, walking, scrolling TikTok... all your regular day to day, keep yourself existing kinda stuff.

When you eat more calories than you burn → your body stores the extra as fat.

When you eat fewer calories than you burn → your body uses stored fat for energy.

That “fewer” part is called a calorie deficit, and it’s the only way fat loss actually happens.

Simple. Not easy. But simple.

🎯 How to Work Out Your Calorie Target

There's a tonne of fancy formulas and online calculators which will all pump out a number for you, but to make it easy for you I’ve created a super simple method that can get you a realistic target right away...

In short:

Work out your goal body weight in lbs (ie: what you want to weigh - in pounds!)
Multiply that number by 12 (so if you would like to weigh 150lbs, multiply that by 12)
Your answer is your daily calorie target (using my example: 150 x 12 = 1,800 kcals)

Once the maths is done, the real work starts doing your best to get as close as you can to your goal consistently, for a sustained period of time. That means longer than just Monday & Tuesday this week... keep it going for 6 - 8 weeks and see where it takes you.

Remember, it's never about hitting the perfect number, so find what’s realistic for you and stick with it long enough to see results.

🧾 What If You Hate Counting Calories?

Good news: you don’t have to count forever, or even at all.

Here are a few realistic options:

✅ Track for one week. Just to see where you’re at. You’ll be amazed how much you learn about portion sizes and “hidden” calories in some of your favourite foods.

✅ Use rough estimates. You don’t need to log every crumb precisely, think in ballparks, not decimals.

✅ Focus on food awareness. Notice what meals fill you up versus what leaves you hungry. More protein, more fibre, and fewer liquid calories usually help.

It's only an estimate anyway...

Here’s the thing no one tells you: calorie tracking will never be 100% accurate, and that’s perfectly fine.

Food labels can legally be off by up to 20%, restaurant meals are basically educated guesses, and even your fitness tracker is doing a bit of creative maths.

So if you’ve ever felt stressed about logging your meals “wrong,” let that go right now.

The goal isn’t perfection, it’s education.

When you start tracking, you’re simply learning about your habits:

🍞 how much you tend to eat,

🥜 which foods are calorie dense,

🥗 and what fills you up versus what doesn’t.

That awareness alone can completely change your results, with no calculator required.

Think of calorie counting as a guidebook, not a rule book.

Once you’ve got a feel for it, you’ll naturally start making smarter food choices without even thinking about the numbers, and that's the healthiest place to be long term :)

🎙️ Listen to the Full Podcast

Katie and I dove deeper into this topic on The Voice of Fitness Reason where we talk about calorie tracking, awareness, and how to make it all feel less stressful.

Also available on Spotify, Apple and all decent podcast players.