How big should a calorie deficit be?

The usual range

Something like 10 to 20 % below your total daily energy expenditure, which for most people means 300 to 600 kcal. In practice that gives 0.5 to 1 % of body weight lost per week.

Faster than that and two things happen together: the share of the loss coming from muscle rises, and adherence falls. You end up lighter, less muscular, and hungrier — the exact combination that makes the weight come back.

Why it eventually stalls

Partly arithmetic: a lighter body burns less, so the deficit you set two months ago is smaller today at the same intake.

Partly behaviour, and this is the larger half. Portions drift, tracking gets looser, and spontaneous movement drops — you fidget less, take the lift, walk slower. That last effect is real and largely unconscious.

A stall is not a broken metabolism. It is a deficit that has closed.

What to do about it

First, verify. Two weeks of honest logging tells you whether the intake is still what you think it is. Most stalls end here.

If it is real, a maintenance break of one to two weeks — eating at your new expenditure, not more — is a well-supported option. It restores adherence and sometimes the hormonal signals of hunger, and costs you almost nothing in time.

Cutting further is the last option, not the first. There is a floor: Camaleo never sets a target below your basal rate, and applies its health guardrails — pregnancy, low BMI, being a minor, eating-disorder history — before any of this maths runs.

The part nobody plans

What comes after. A deficit is a temporary state, and the transition back to maintenance is where most of the regain happens.

Plan it as deliberately as the deficit itself: return to maintenance gradually, keep training, keep the protein. The goal was never the lowest number on the scale — it was keeping what you built.