260 to 200, and the arithmetic that got there

Educational only — not medical or nutritional advice. Talk to a doctor or registered dietitian before changing how you eat, especially with any medical condition, medication, or history of disordered eating.

Start with maintenance, not a diet

Maintenance is the intake at which weight is stable. Every formula for it is an estimate, and estimates are wrong for individuals — so use one to start, then correct it with real data.

Rough start: maintenance ≈ bodyweight (lb) × 14–16 Then: eat that for 10–14 days, track weight daily, and adjust based on the trend, not the formula

Your own two-week trend beats any calculator. The formula gets you within a few hundred calories; the data closes the gap.

Deficit size

A pound of body fat is commonly approximated at around 3,500 calories, which makes a 500-per-day deficit roughly a pound a week. It is an approximation — adaptive changes and water shifts blur it — but it is a workable planning number.

The deficit you actually follow beats the optimal one you abandon in three weeks. That is the entire lesson and most people learn it the slow way, twice.

Protein is the one macro worth defending

In a deficit the body will take some of the weight from lean mass. Adequate protein plus resistance training is what shifts the balance toward fat. Common practical guidance is roughly 0.7–1.0 g per pound of target bodyweight, which is generous but simple to hit and hard to overshoot in a deficit.

Protein also has the highest satiety per calorie of the three macros, so the floor makes the deficit easier to live with. Fill the remaining calories with carbohydrate and fat in whatever split you personally adhere to best — that ratio matters far less than the total and the protein floor.

Why the scale lies

Daily weight moves with water, glycogen, sodium, digestion, and sleep — swings of several pounds that have nothing to do with fat. It is entirely normal for the scale to stall for ten days and then drop three pounds overnight while the underlying loss was perfectly steady.

• Weigh daily, at the same time, under the same conditions.
• Judge only the weekly average against the previous weekly average. Never compare two individual days.
• Expect a stall after high sodium, hard training, or poor sleep.
• If the four-week trend is flat, the deficit is not real — recheck portions and untracked intake before touching the plan.

The tracking method that survives

1. Track weight daily, look at it weekly.
2. Track intake honestly for two weeks to calibrate, then loosely once the portions are known.
3. Keep a protein floor as a hard rule; treat everything else as a target.
4. Lift, and keep a record of the lifts. Strength holding steady in a deficit is the best available evidence that the weight leaving is mostly fat.
5. Take a photo monthly. It is the only measure that captures what the scale cannot.

The part nobody writes down

Sixty pounds took a long time, and most of that time was unremarkable. The weeks that felt like failure were mostly water. The thing that made it work was not discipline in any heroic sense — it was reducing the number of decisions: same breakfast, known portions, one number to check per week.

I built Cut for that shape of tracking: weight in, trend out, no account, no server, nothing leaves your device.

Tools referenced in this guide

• Cut — weight and body-recomposition tracker — offline, local-only, no signup.
• Fire — daily ritual checklist for the habits underneath it.
• Media kit — the full transformation story and creator work.