The gram target, worked out for common body weights
To convert on your own: divide your weight in pounds by 2.205 to get kilograms, then multiply by 1.2 for the low end and 1.6 for the high end.
| Body weight | 1.2 g/kg | 1.6 g/kg |
|---|---|---|
| 130 lb / 59 kg | 71 g | 94 g |
| 150 lb / 68 kg | 82 g | 109 g |
| 170 lb / 77 kg | 93 g | 123 g |
| 190 lb / 86 kg | 103 g | 138 g |
| 210 lb / 95 kg | 114 g | 152 g |
| 230 lb / 104 kg | 125 g | 167 g |
| 250 lb / 113 kg | 136 g | 181 g |
| 280 lb / 127 kg | 152 g | 203 g |
Where you sit inside the range usually depends on how much resistance training you're doing and how aggressive the calorie deficit is. If you're lifting several days a week you belong at the top of it, which is where the ISSN numbers start. The bottom is closer to a floor than a goal.
One caveat worth repeating. At 280 lb, 203 grams of protein is an enormous amount of food, and on a GLP-1 you may have nowhere near the appetite for it. That's part of why some clinicians calculate from an adjusted body weight instead of current weight. If the number in this table looks impossible, that's a good thing to bring to your prescriber or dietitian rather than something to white-knuckle through.
Why the number is hard to hit when your appetite disappears
Running the math takes ten seconds. Eating the result is where people get stuck.
On a GLP-1, gastric emptying slows and hunger signals go quiet. Intake often falls by several hundred calories a day without any deliberate restriction, and further in the days right after a dose increase. If you're eating 1,200 calories and your target is 130 grams of protein, protein alone accounts for 520 of those calories. That's 43 percent of your intake, which means almost every bite has to be doing work.
Usually the miss comes from a skipped meal rather than a bad food choice. You're not hungry at noon, you push lunch to 3pm, then you're full by 6pm, and the day ends at 55 grams. Do that five days a week and the shortfall in protein is proportionally much bigger than the shortfall in calories.
A few things that tend to help, none of them medical advice:
- Front-load the day. Appetite is often best in the morning and worst in the evening, especially on dose days. Getting 35 to 40 grams in before 10am takes the pressure off a dinner you may not want.
- Eat the protein portion of a meal first. If you get full halfway through, at least the half you finished was the part that counted.
- Repeat the same meals. Unglamorous, and it works. Two or three high-protein meals you can eat on autopilot beat variety you never get around to cooking.
- Count liquids and soft foods. A shake, cottage cheese, Greek yogurt, or a fortified soup often goes down when a solid chicken breast won't, particularly in the 48 hours after an injection.
For reference: 4 oz of cooked chicken breast is roughly 35 g, a cup of nonfat Greek yogurt about 22 g, three large eggs about 19 g, a cup of 2 percent cottage cheese about 24 g, and a typical whey scoop 24 to 30 g. Four of those in a day gets you past 100 grams.
How to check what you're eating instead of guessing
When I started weighing food, I was well under what I would have guessed, and the first week of logging is where you find out by how much. The gap tends to come from a few predictable places: counting a chicken sandwich as the chicken and forgetting the bun is most of the mass, using a raw weight where the label was for cooked, or eyeballing a portion that turns out to be 3 oz instead of 6 oz.
You don't need to log forever. A week is usually enough to see the shape of the problem. You're looking for one thing: the gap between your average day and the number in the table above.
Two things make that week less annoying. A food database with real serving sizes, so you can pick "1 cup chopped" or "1 medium apple" instead of doing gram conversions in your head at the kitchen counter. And a barcode scanner, because the fastest accurate log is the one where you point a camera at the yogurt cup and move on.
Then set your protein number yourself rather than accepting whatever a default calculator hands you. A generic macro split that assigns 25 percent of calories to protein will give someone eating 1,100 calories a target of 69 grams, which is under 1.2 g/kg for anyone over about 127 pounds. On a GLP-1 the calorie number moves around week to week. The protein number should hold steady.
What this page doesn't answer, and who to ask
This gives you a gram range and a way to check yourself against it. It can't tell you whether that range is right for your body, your labs, or your medication.
Talk to your prescriber or a registered dietitian if any of these apply: you have reduced kidney function or a history of kidney disease, you have liver disease, you're pregnant or nursing, you're losing weight faster than your care team expected, you have persistent nausea or vomiting, or your intake has dropped so low that you're struggling to eat much of anything. Very low total intake on a GLP-1 is worth a call to your clinician.
Nothing here is dosing guidance. Your dose, your titration schedule, and how to administer the medication come from your prescriber and from the manufacturer's instructions for your specific product, and from nowhere else.
I built LockedIn to see my own numbers. I have no clinical training. The app tracks what you tell it, and it doesn't know anything about your bloodwork.