How much protein should I eat a day?

It depends on what you're doing. The RDA is 0.8 g/kg (0.36 g/lb) — about 61 g for a 170 lb adult — but that's the floor that prevents deficiency, not an optimum, and it was derived in sedentary people who weren't dieting. For general health without training, 1.2–1.4 g/kg is a reasonable target. For fat loss while protecting muscle, 1.6–2.2 g/kg. For building muscle in a surplus, 1.6–2.0 g/kg. Healthy adults over about 65 are generally advised to take in 1.0–1.2 g/kg to help offset age-related muscle loss.

Is there a daily protein intake calculator?

Yes — the Protein Calculator at burnfatandgetfit.com/protein-calculator takes your bodyweight, goal, and activity level and returns a daily protein target in grams, then divides it across your meals. The Macro Calculator does the same inside a full daily calorie plan, setting protein first and filling the remaining calories with fat and carbohydrate.

Is 100g of protein a day enough?

It depends on your bodyweight and goal. For a 140 lb person losing fat, 100 g sits right around 0.7 g per pound — a solid target. For a 200 lb person in a deficit, 100 g is roughly half of the 140–200 g the evidence supports, and low enough that muscle loss becomes a real risk during a cut. As a general reference, 100 g comfortably clears the RDA for almost any adult (which is about 61 g at 170 lb), but clearing the deficiency floor is a much lower bar than protecting lean mass while dieting.

How much protein can you absorb in one meal?

The idea that protein above 20–30 g per meal is wasted is a misreading — the body absorbs essentially all of it. What plateaus is muscle protein synthesis, which responds to a per-meal dose rather than a daily total. Schoenfeld and Aragon (2018) reviewed the evidence and recommended about 0.4 g/kg per meal across at least four meals, which works out to roughly 25–40 g of protein three to four times a day for most people. Total daily protein still matters far more than the timing; spreading it out is a modest optimization, not a requirement.

How Much Protein Per Day?

Q: How much protein per day to lose weight?

For fat loss with muscle retention, the evidence supports roughly 0.7–1.0 g of protein per pound of bodyweight (1.6–2.2 g/kg) — about 120–170 g a day for a 170 lb person. Sit toward the lower end if you're heavier or new to training, and toward the upper end if you're already lean or running an aggressive deficit. If you carry substantial body fat, base the target on your goal weight rather than your current weight, since grams-per-pound formulas assume the weight is metabolically active tissue. Protein doesn't burn fat on its own — you still need a calorie deficit — but it determines how much of the loss is fat rather than muscle.

Q: Can you eat too much protein?

In healthy people, high protein intake has not been shown to damage the kidneys — a 2018 meta-analysis by Devries and colleagues in the Journal of Nutrition found no adverse effect on glomerular filtration rate in healthy adults, and controlled studies in trained people eating well over 3 g/kg have found no harm to kidney or liver markers. The real limits are practical rather than medical: protein still carries 4 calories per gram, very high intakes crowd out fiber and vegetables, and gains in lean mass flatten out past roughly 1.6–2.2 g/kg. Anyone with existing kidney disease should discuss protein intake with a doctor, as the situation is genuinely different.

For most adults losing fat, the useful range is 0.7 to 1.0 grams of protein per pound of bodyweight (1.6–2.2 g/kg). The RDA of 0.36 g/lb that you've probably seen quoted is a different thing entirely: it's the amount that prevents deficiency, not the amount that holds onto muscle while you diet.

Where you land inside that band depends on what you're doing:

Your situation	Per lb of bodyweight	Per kg	A 170 lb person
RDA — the deficiency floor	0.36 g	0.8 g	61 g
General health, not training	0.5–0.6 g	1.2–1.4 g	85–100 g
Fat loss, protecting muscle (most people reading this)	0.7–0.8 g	1.6–1.8 g	120–135 g
Fat loss while already lean, or in an aggressive deficit	0.9–1.0 g	2.0–2.2 g	150–170 g
Building muscle in a surplus	0.7–0.9 g	1.6–2.0 g	120–150 g
Adults over ~65	0.5–0.55 g	1.0–1.2 g	85–95 g

If you'd rather not do the arithmetic, the Protein Calculator puts you inside this band from your weight, goal, and activity level, and splits the target across meals.

Two notes before the reasoning, because they're where people get the number wrong:

If you carry a lot of fat, base the target on your goal weight, not your current weight. Grams-per-pound formulas assume the pound is metabolically active tissue. At 300 lb, 1 g/lb is 300 g of protein — far more than the evidence supports, and more than most people can eat. Use your target weight (or your lean mass, if you know it) instead.
The band is not a cliff. Going from 60 g to 130 g is a large change. Going from 130 g to 160 g is a rounding error by comparison. Get inside the range and stop optimizing.

The RDA Is a Floor, Not a Target

The RDA for protein is 0.8 g/kg of bodyweight (0.36 g/lb) — about 61 g for a 170 lb adult, or roughly two chicken breasts' worth for the entire day.

The number gets misread constantly, and the misreading matters. An RDA is set to cover the minimum requirement of about 97.5% of healthy people. It answers the question "below what intake do we start seeing a problem?" — not "what intake produces the best body composition?" Those questions have very different answers, and the second one is the one you're actually asking.

The RDA is also derived from nitrogen balance studies in sedentary adults who aren't dieting. Two of the situations where protein needs rise most — being in a calorie deficit and training hard — are precisely the situations it was never designed to cover.

So the honest framing: 0.36 g/lb keeps you out of deficiency. It isn't wrong, it's just answering a question you didn't ask.

How Much Protein Per Day to Lose Weight

In a deficit, your body needs energy and it will take it from whatever's available — including muscle. Protein plus resistance training is the signal that tells it to spare the muscle and burn the fat instead. That's the whole reason a fat-loss target sits above a general-health one.

The clearest demonstration comes from Longland et al. (2016, American Journal of Clinical Nutrition). Forty young men ran a steep (~40%) calorie deficit for four weeks alongside resistance training and high-intensity work. Everything was matched between the groups except protein: one got 2.4 g/kg, the other 1.2 g/kg. The high-protein group gained about a kilogram of lean mass while losing more fat. The low-protein group — eating an amount well above the RDA — essentially held their lean mass flat and lost less fat. Same calories, same training, different tissue.

For the ceiling, the reference is Morton et al. (2018, British Journal of Sports Medicine), a meta-analysis of 49 studies and 1,863 participants. Protein intake beyond roughly 1.6 g/kg/day (0.73 g/lb) produced no further gains in lean mass, though the confidence interval stretched to about 2.2 g/kg — which is why the sensible advice is a band, not a point.

The one case for pushing toward the top of that band is being lean and dieting hard. As body fat drops, there's less stored energy to draw on and muscle becomes a more attractive fuel source. Helms et al. (2014, IJSNEM) reviewed lean, resistance-trained athletes in a deficit and landed on 2.3–3.1 g/kg of fat-free mass — a genuinely high intake, aimed at a specific population that is already lean and getting leaner. If you're at 30% body fat and starting out, that recommendation isn't about you.

Worth being clear about what protein does not do: it isn't a fat-loss agent. You still have to be in a calorie deficit. Protein changes what you lose, and it makes the deficit easier to hold — which is the next section, and arguably the bigger effect for most people.

Why Protein Makes a Deficit Easier to Hold

Ask why high-protein diets work and most people say "muscle." For anyone who isn't lifting seriously, the honest answer is hunger. Protein is the most filling macronutrient per calorie, and that changes how much you eat without any conscious effort to eat less.

The demonstration is Weigle et al. (2005, AJCN). Subjects raised protein from 15% to 30% of calories. In the first phase calories were held constant, so nothing could change but satiety — and reported fullness rose. Then researchers let them eat freely, with no calorie target at all. Intake dropped by about 441 calories a day spontaneously, and participants lost roughly 4.9 kg over 12 weeks while being told to eat as much as they wanted.

Nobody was dieting. They just ate more protein and stopped being as hungry.

There's a smaller, real thermic effect on top of it. Protein costs 20–30% of its own calories to digest and process, against 5–10% for carbohydrate and 0–3% for fat. Eat 150 g of protein (600 calories) and you burn something like 120–180 of those just handling it. It's a genuine edge, but it's a bonus — an order of magnitude smaller than the appetite effect.

The catch is that "high protein" and "filling" aren't the same thing. Cheddar cheese is 25 g of protein per 100 g, which sounds excellent, and 402 calories, three quarters of which are fat. Fat, fiber, and water content all change how much fullness a food buys you per calorie. To compare two foods on that basis directly, score them in the Satiety Per Calorie Calculator — lean meats, seafood, and low-fat dairy land in the high band, while fattier proteins and most protein snack products don't. Satiety per calorie, explained covers why the ranking works out the way it does.

The Best Protein Sources, Ranked by PE Ratio

The PE ratio — protein divided by non-protein energy (fat + net carbs), the framework behind the PE Diet Guide — is the cleanest way to sort protein sources. A high PE ratio means the food brings protein and very little else along for the ride, which is exactly what you want when your protein target is high and your calorie budget isn't.

Per 100 g, raw or as packaged:

Food	Protein	PE ratio	% of calories from protein
Shrimp	24 g	48.0	96%
Turkey breast	29 g	29.0	93%
Tuna (canned in water)	26 g	26.0	92%
Cod	18 g	25.7	92%
Egg whites	11 g	12.2	91%
Chicken breast	31 g	8.6	79%
Whey protein powder	80 g	7.3	84%
93% lean ground beef	21 g	3.0	57%
Low-fat cottage cheese	12 g	2.7	68%
Nonfat Greek yogurt	10 g	2.3	66%
Salmon	20 g	1.5	41%
Whole eggs	13 g	1.1	33%
Cheddar cheese	25 g	0.7	25%
Lentils (cooked)	9 g	0.7	30%

A few things fall out of that table that a raw protein-per-100g list would hide:

Seafood and poultry breast dominate, and it isn't close. Shrimp is 96% protein by calories. These are the foods that make a 150 g day fit inside 1,800 calories.
Salmon and whole eggs score poorly, and that's fine. They're nutritious foods with real fat in them — the PE ratio measures protein density, not virtue. If your calories allow, the fat buys you satiety too. If you're chasing a high target on a tight budget, they cost more than they look like they do.
Cheddar is the trap. Twenty-five grams of protein per 100 g reads as a protein food; a PE ratio of 0.7 says it's a fat source with protein in it.
Legumes sit lower than their reputation because the protein arrives packaged with carbohydrate — though the fiber earns much of that back on satiety. For the trade-offs, see plant vs. animal protein for fat loss.

If you'd rather not memorize a table, the top 50 foods by satiety is the practical shopping version, and the PE Diet Calculator will score anything not on this list.

On powder: it's a convenience, not a requirement. Whole food should cover most of the target — but a scoop is a legitimate way to close a 30 g gap on a day that got away from you, and at a PE ratio of 7.3 it's cheap in calories. Protein powder vs. whole food protein covers when each makes sense.

Does Protein Timing Matter?

Less than the supplement industry needs you to believe, and a little more than the backlash claims.

Total daily protein is the lever that matters. If you hit your number, the clock is a detail. The "anabolic window" — the idea that protein must be consumed within 30–60 minutes of training or the session is wasted — has not held up. The window, to the extent it exists, is measured in hours, and training on top of an already well-fed day doesn't create an emergency.

What does earn its keep is distribution. Muscle protein synthesis responds to a per-meal dose rather than a daily total, and one enormous serving doesn't stimulate it proportionally more than a moderate one. Schoenfeld and Aragon (2018, JISSN) reviewed this and landed on roughly 0.4 g/kg per meal across at least four meals — which conveniently arrives at about 1.6 g/kg for the day.

In practice: three to four meals of 25–40 g each, spread across your waking hours. That's it. A common failure pattern is 10 g at breakfast, 15 g at lunch, and then a 90 g dinner to catch up — a distribution that hits the daily target on paper while leaving most of the day under-fed and, not incidentally, most of the day hungry. Moving protein earlier tends to fix both problems at once.

Two smaller points, in proportion:

Pre-sleep protein (~40 g of a slow-digesting source like casein) does measurably raise overnight muscle protein synthesis. Real, modest, and only worth thinking about once the daily total is handled. See whey vs. casein.
Plant-based eaters may want to sit slightly higher in the band. Plant proteins are generally lower in leucine and less digestible, and variety across sources matters more than it does for omnivores.

If you're already tracking calories, the cleanest way to place protein inside the day is to set it first and let fat and carbs fill the remainder — which is exactly what the Macro Calculator does.

Can You Eat Too Much Protein?

The kidney concern comes up constantly, so it's worth answering directly: in healthy people, the evidence does not support it. Devries et al. (2018, Journal of Nutrition) meta-analyzed the trials and found higher protein intakes did not adversely affect kidney function (glomerular filtration rate) in healthy adults. Controlled work in trained populations eating well above 3 g/kg has likewise not turned up harm to kidney or liver markers.

The important qualifier: this applies to healthy kidneys. If you have existing kidney disease, protein intake is a genuine clinical question and belongs with your doctor, not an article. Same if you're pregnant, managing a chronic condition, or on a medication that affects kidney function.

The realistic limits on protein aren't medical, they're practical:

Calories still count. Protein has 4 calories per gram. It is not free, and it will not create a deficit by itself.
Crowding out. A day built entirely around protein leaves less room for the fiber, fruit, and vegetables that do other jobs.
Diminishing returns. Past roughly 1.6–2.2 g/kg, you're buying nothing measurable in lean mass. Higher intakes aren't dangerous for a healthy person; they're just pointless.
It gets tedious. The best protein target is the one you'll still be hitting in six months.

The Bottom Line

The RDA answers a question about deficiency. If your question is about fat loss, the answer is roughly 0.7–1.0 g per pound of bodyweight — toward the low end if you're heavier or just starting, toward the high end if you're already lean or dieting aggressively, and calculated from your goal weight rather than your current weight if you're carrying substantial fat.

The strongest reason to eat that much isn't the one you'll hear most. Muscle retention is real and well-evidenced. But the effect that shows up for nearly everyone is that a high-protein diet is easier to stay on, because you're less hungry on the same calories — and a deficit you can actually hold is the one that works.

Hit the number, spread it across three or four meals, build those meals around foods with a high PE ratio, and stop worrying about the rest.

Get your number in grams from the Protein Calculator.
Fit it into a full daily plan with the Macro Calculator.
Score any food on fullness per calorie in the Satiety Per Calorie Calculator.
Understand the protein-to-energy framework in the PE Diet Guide.
Put it on a plate with a high-protein meal plan for fat loss.