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If you're a 55 year old woman looking to lose weight, your maintenance is probably somewhere between 1,600 and 1,800 calories a day, and your loss target is likely 1,350 to 1,500. That's the honest range for most women in that age bracket at a normal height and a moderate activity level. It's lower than what most calculators tell you, and that gap is why a lot of people eat at "a deficit" for months and don't move.
One thing before the math. If you're in your first couple of months of carnivore, you don't need any of this yet. Eat to satiety, let protein and fat do the counting for you, and come back to this when appetite alone has stopped moving the needle or you want a number to check yourself against.
Here's the thing. That range is a starting point, not a verdict. The real number is yours, and you can find it in about three weeks with a scale, a notebook, and a little patience. Let me walk you through the math, then the adjustment, then how to set the deficit so you lose fat instead of the muscle you spent decades building.
Start with the math, not the chart
Use the Mifflin-St Jeor formula. It's the one most dietitians still trust for adults over 50. For women it looks like this:
- 10 x weight in kg
- plus 6.25 x height in cm
- minus 5 x your age
- minus 161
Say you're 55, 5 feet 5 inches, and 170 pounds. That works out to a resting burn of about 1,365 calories. That's what your body uses just keeping you alive on the couch.
Now the part where people go wrong. You multiply that resting number by an activity factor. Online charts love to hand out 1.55 or 1.7. Don't take it. If you have a desk job or you're retired and you walk a few times a week, use 1.2 to 1.3. That gives you 1,640 to 1,775 calories. That's your maintenance estimate.
If you want a starting point for your numbers without doing the arithmetic by hand, the free macro calculator runs the same formula and gives you protein and fat targets alongside the calorie number.
Why the online charts run high
Three reasons, and none of them are your fault.
Activity multipliers were built on younger bodies. The tables assume the kind of all-day movement most of us stopped doing around 40. Three gym sessions a week doesn't make you "moderately active" if the other 165 hours are spent sitting.
Lean mass drops with age. Muscle burns more at rest than fat does. Most people lose 3 to 8 percent of their muscle per decade after 30, and it speeds up after 50. Less muscle, lower burn, every single day.
Fidgeting goes down too. Researchers call it NEAT, the calories you burn pacing, standing, gesturing, taking the stairs. It quietly falls off with age and it falls off further when you cut calories. That can be a few hundred calories a day that just evaporates without you noticing.
Add those up and a chart that says 2,100 for a 55 year old woman can be off by 400 calories. Eat to that number and you'll maintain forever while feeling like you're trying hard.
Check the estimate against real life
The formula gives you a hypothesis. Now test it.
Eat at your estimated maintenance for 14 days. Don't diet, don't cut, just eat that number consistently and track it. Weigh yourself every morning after the bathroom, before food, same conditions. Then compare your seven day average from week one to week two.
Weight held steady? Your estimate was right. Went up half a pound or more? Your true maintenance is roughly 150 to 250 calories lower. Went down? It's higher, and you get to eat more. This is the step almost everyone skips, and it's the one that makes the rest of it work.
If you're not sure what that number looks like on a plate, we broke down what 1,500 calories of carnivore food actually looks like in a full day of eating.
Set a deficit that protects muscle
Once you know maintenance, cut 10 to 20 percent. For that 1,700 calorie example, that's 1,360 to 1,530. Start at the smaller cut. You can always take more later, and you'll need somewhere to go when things slow down.
Aim for 0.5 to 1 pound per week. I know that sounds slow. It's also the rate where the weight coming off is mostly fat. Push past 1 percent of your body weight per week after 50 and a real chunk of what you lose is lean tissue, which lowers your maintenance further and makes the next round harder. That's how people end up eating 1,100 calories and getting nowhere. It's also the mechanism behind most long stalls, which we covered in why carnivore weight loss stops.
Two more rules that matter more than the calorie number itself:
- Hit your protein every day. Aim for 0.8 to 1 gram per pound of your goal body weight. For a 145 pound goal, that's 116 to 145 grams. Older muscle responds less to protein than young muscle does, so you need more of it, not less.
- Lift something heavy twice a week. Protein is the material. Resistance training is the signal that tells your body to keep the muscle instead of burning it. Two sessions a week is enough. Squats, a press, a row, a hinge. That's the whole program.
Walking is great for you, but it doesn't send that signal. Do both.
If you're on medication
Thyroid medication, blood pressure medication, diabetes drugs, and antidepressants can all change what your body does with food and how the scale behaves. Beta blockers can lower resting heart rate and burn. Thyroid dosing affects metabolic rate directly. If you're on any of these, your doctor needs to know you're cutting calories, because dosages sometimes need adjusting as weight comes off. That's not optional. Medications and diagnosed conditions require professional management. Period.
How you'll know it's working
Weekly averages, not daily numbers. Sodium, hormones, and how much is in your digestive tract move the scale two or three pounds in a day and none of it is fat.
Track four things: your seven day average weight, waist measurement once a month, whether your strength in the gym is holding, and how your clothes fit. If the scale stalls for two full weeks but your waist is shrinking and your lifts are going up, you're winning. Don't cut calories in that situation. If everything is flat for three weeks, drop 100 calories, not 400, and reassess.
Women in this age group have a few extra variables worth knowing about, and Sarah walked through them in her piece on carnivore macros for women over 45.
Stop overthinking it. Get your number, test it, cut a little, eat your protein, lift twice a week. That's the whole protocol.
I'm not a doctor. I've coached people and competed myself, so I know what works in practice. But I'm not your doctor. If you have health issues or take medication, check with someone qualified before changing how you eat. Everything here is based on what works in the field and what the research supports. Your mileage may vary.