How Much Protein a Day, and How to Hit It Without Powder
The short answer
For most adults eating less than they burn, a reasonable protein floor is somewhere around 1.2 to 1.6 grams per kilogram of body weight per day — roughly 85 to 110 g for someone of 70 kg, or 100 to 130 g for someone of 85 kg. You can reach that on ordinary food: a pot of Greek yoghurt, two eggs, a tin of tuna and a chicken breast spread across a day already come to about 85 g between them, with no powder involved.
That range is deliberately wide, because the honest answer is wide. The gap between adequate and optimal is much smaller than the internet suggests, and both are a long way above what a lot of people eat by accident.
Why protein, and not something else?
When you cut calories, every macronutrient shrinks unless you defend one. Protein is the one worth defending, for two fairly unglamorous reasons.
The first is fullness. Protein tends to be the most satiating of the three macronutrients per calorie, which matters when the total is smaller than you'd like. Two scrambled eggs and a slice of toast cost about the same as a croissant and leave most people feeling differently at 11am. If you are consistently hungry on a number that ought to be enough, the composition of the day is usually where the answer is — we went through the other causes in what actually differs when you're still hungry on the same calories.
The second is that weight lost in a deficit is not purely fat. Some lean tissue comes off too, and eating enough protein — along with doing some resistance work — is the ordinary advice for keeping that share small. This isn't a performance claim or a clinical one. It's just that a reduced-calorie diet with too little protein is the version that tends to go worst.
Why per kilogram, rather than one number for everyone?
Because "100 g of protein" means something very different to a 55 kg person and a 100 kg person. Protein needs track lean tissue, and lean tissue tracks body size. A single universal figure is either generous for small people or thin for large ones.
Published dietary guidance generally puts the adult reference intake at about 0.8 g per kg — that figure is the amount that prevents deficiency in a typical healthy adult, not the amount that works best when you're deliberately eating less than you burn. The commonly suggested range for a deficit sits above it, which is where the 1.2–1.6 g/kg comes from.
Two practical adjustments. If you're carrying a lot of extra weight, scaling to your full body weight can produce a number that's awkwardly high; using a goal weight, or the weight you'd be at a BMI in the mid-twenties, gives a more sensible figure. And if you're eating at maintenance rather than in a deficit, the case for pushing to the top of the range weakens considerably.
More is not automatically better. Above roughly 1.6 g/kg the returns flatten out, and past about 2 g/kg you're mostly reorganising your calories rather than improving anything. Protein displaces other food, and a day with no carbohydrate left in it is harder to train on and harder to keep up. If you have any reason to be careful about protein intake, that's a conversation for your doctor, not a blog.
What does hitting the target cost in calories?
Protein carries about 4 kcal per gram, so the target itself has a price inside your budget.
At 1.6 g/kg, a 70 kg person is aiming for about 112 g, which is roughly 450 kcal — around 22% of a 2,000 kcal day. Going up to 2.2 g/kg would mean 154 g, about 620 kcal, and that extra 170 kcal has to come out of something else.
There's a second cost people miss: protein rarely arrives alone. Those 30 g of protein from a chicken breast cost about 165 kcal. The same 30 g from cheddar costs roughly 500 kcal, because cheese is mostly fat. Neither is wrong, but within a fixed budget the leaner sources buy you more food elsewhere. If your deficit is already aggressive, that trade-off gets tight fast — how big your deficit is determines how much room you have to play with.
Where the gap usually is
Track a normal week and the shortfall almost always shows up in the same two places.
Breakfast. Toast and jam is about 6 g. A bowl of cereal with semi-skimmed milk is about 12 g. A banana and a coffee is about 2 g. Meanwhile dinner is often 40 g on its own. People aren't short of protein overall so much as they're short of it before midday.
Snacks. Crisps, biscuits, fruit, a flapjack — these are between 1 and 4 g each. Three of them in a day is 300–400 kcal that contributed almost nothing to the target.
Fix those two and the rest usually looks after itself.
Ordinary foods, with their actual numbers
Approximate figures, of the kind published in USDA FoodData Central; round them and treat them as estimates.
Greek yoghurt, 170 g pot (0% fat) — about 17 g protein, 100 kcal
Skyr, 200 g — about 20 g, 130 kcal
Two large eggs — about 13 g, 140 kcal
Cottage cheese, 100 g — about 11 g, 100 kcal
Tinned tuna, 120 g drained — about 26 g, 110 kcal
Chicken breast, 100 g cooked — about 31 g, 165 kcal
Salmon, 100 g cooked — about 25 g, 210 kcal
Firm tofu, 100 g — about 13 g, 120 kcal
Cooked lentils, 150 g — about 13 g, 175 kcal
Edamame, 100 g — about 11 g, 120 kcal
Semi-skimmed milk, 250 ml — about 9 g, 115 kcal
Wholemeal bread, 1 slice — about 4 g, 90 kcal
A 70 kg person's 112 g, assembled without thinking hard: yoghurt and two eggs at breakfast (30 g), tuna with bread at lunch (30 g), cottage cheese mid-afternoon (11 g), chicken and lentils at dinner (44 g). That's 115 g for roughly 1,100 kcal, leaving most of the day free for vegetables, fruit, oil and whatever else you want.
Powders are convenient, not necessary. They're useful if you're travelling, or genuinely can't face food in the morning. They are not a nutritional category of their own.
Do you need to track it to the gram?
No. Protein content varies between cuts, brands and cooking losses, and your logging carries error anyway — the same error that applies to calorie counting generally. Landing within about 10 g of your number most days is doing the job.
What's worth knowing is where you actually sit, not where you assume you do. Most people guess high by 20 or 30 g. A week of logging settles it. Day So Far gives you protein alongside calories when you describe a meal in a sentence, so you can see which meal is the thin one without weighing anything — and in practice the answer is breakfast more often than not.
Set the floor, fix the first meal, and stop worrying about the last few grams.