How Much Protein Do You Actually Need?

The number per kilogram, where it comes from, and why the timing questions matter far less than the total.

The short answer

Where the number comes from

The official minimum in most countries is around 0.8 g per kilogram. That figure exists to prevent deficiency in a sedentary adult — it is a floor for health, not a target for someone lifting weights, and reading it as training advice is the most common misunderstanding in this area.

For building muscle, the research consistently lands between roughly 1.6 and 2.2 g per kilogram of bodyweight per day. Above about 2.2 g there is little evidence of further benefit for most people; the extra is simply used as energy.

If you carry a lot of fat, scaling to total bodyweight overshoots — the fat does not need feeding. Scaling to a realistic goal weight instead is close enough, and avoids a target nobody can eat.

Why it goes up when you are cutting

In a calorie deficit your body is looking for energy, and muscle is one of the places it can find some. Two things make it look elsewhere: a training stimulus saying the muscle is still needed, and enough protein to rebuild what training damages.

So the leaner you get and the steeper the deficit, the further up the range you want to be. Someone eating 2.2 g/kg in a cut is not being excessive; they are buying insurance on the thing they are training to keep.

Protein also has the highest satiety of the three macronutrients and the highest thermic effect — a meaningful fraction of its energy is spent digesting it. Neither is a reason to eat nothing else, but both help when food is limited.

How to actually hit it

Most people who miss their protein target miss it by 30-50 g, and almost always in the same place: breakfast, and whatever is eaten between meals. Lunch and dinner tend to look after themselves.

• Anchor each meal with a protein source first, then build the rest of the plate around it.
• Fix breakfast. Moving from bread and jam to quark, eggs or skyr often closes the whole gap on its own.
• Know three or four high-protein snacks you actually like. A target you have to think about at 4pm is a target you will miss.
• Powder is food, not a supplement in any meaningful sense. It is a convenient way to add 20-25 g and has no special property beyond that.

Timing: what matters and what does not

The anabolic window — the belief that protein must be eaten within 30 minutes of training or the session is wasted — has not survived scrutiny. The effect is real but the window is measured in hours, and for anyone who has eaten at all that day it is already open.

Spreading protein across three to five meals is mildly better than one enormous serving, mostly because it is easier to eat that way. There is no per-sitting limit beyond which protein is discarded; it is simply used more slowly.

• Worth doing: hit the daily total, most days.
• Worth doing: spread it across the meals you were going to eat anyway.
• Not worth worrying about: the exact minute after training.
• Not worth worrying about: whether 50 g in one meal is "too much to absorb". It is not.

Is more protein bad for you?

In healthy people with healthy kidneys, intakes in the range discussed here have not been shown to cause harm. The concern comes from advice given to people who already have kidney disease, where restriction is genuinely appropriate, and it has been generalised to everyone else without support.

If you have kidney disease, or any condition your doctor has given you dietary instructions for, follow those instructions rather than an article on the internet. This one included.

Frequently asked questions