Pillar 02 · Fitness
Protein
Calculator
How much protein do you need in a day? A nutrition goal without a number is a mood. This works out one figure — your Protein Floor — then shows you what it looks like in ordinary supermarket food, so you can answer “did I hit it” without weighing anything or opening an app.
Your bodyweight
Total bodyweight. Close enough is fine — this is a floor, not a prescription.
Three solid meals beat six light grazes, particularly past forty.
Changes the per-meal advice, not the daily floor.
Your Protein Floor
Bodyweight in kilograms × 1.6
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What that looks like in real food
Tap what you'd actually eat in a day. Tap again to add another portion. Every one of these is in every UK supermarket, and the own-brand version costs a fraction of anything marketed as a fitness product.
The floor is the number you're aiming not to fall below, rather than a target to obsess over hitting exactly. Round it to something memorable and stop there.
Three anchors of roughly thirty grams get most people close without tracking a thing. The gym session and the meal are not two separate chores — they are one mechanism, and doing both is what makes either worth doing.
How this is worked out
- The Protein Floor is bodyweight in kilograms multiplied by 1.6. A large meta-analysis of resistance-training studies found gains in muscle and strength improved up to roughly 1.6g per kilogram per day, after which the returns flattened out.
- More than that is not harmful for most healthy people. It just stops buying much.
- Muscle protein synthesis responds to individual doses, not only the daily total — roughly 20 to 40g in a sitting switches it on. A day with 130g across three meals does more than a day with 130g where 90 of it arrived at nine in the evening.
- Past forty, older muscle needs a somewhat larger dose for the same response — anabolic resistance. The per-meal figure matters more than the daily total, and the threshold sits nearer the top of that 20 to 40g range.
- Food values are typical for the portion shown and vary by brand and cut — check the packet if you want to be precise. They are close enough for a floor.
- Nothing is stored, sent or saved. The numbers stay in your browser.
One honest note
This is general information, not personalised nutrition or medical advice, and it assumes a healthy adult doing resistance training. Some conditions don't adjust the number here — they reverse it. With reduced kidney function, protein guidance often runs in the opposite direction to everything above, and diabetes, pregnancy and a number of medications shift it too. If any of that applies, the figure on this page is not for you.
In the UK, Kidney Care UK and Diabetes UK both answer questions like this for free and are used to being asked plainly; the British Dietetic Association lists registered dietitians if you want someone to look at your own numbers; and NHS guidance covers the general case. If tracking food is something you have struggled with before, a floor you check once at the end of the day is deliberately the loosest version of this — and if even that starts to feel compulsive, put it down.
This is Pillar 02: Fitness