Protein Intake Calculator — daily grams + per-meal split + food chart

Real-world use cases

• A 78 kg lifter on a cut wants to keep muscle while losing fat

  You weigh 78 kg, lift four times a week, and you are eating about 400 kcal under maintenance. Pick "cut" and "athlete" and the tool lands on roughly 1.9 g/kg, or about 148 g a day. Split across 4 meals that is 37 g each, right at the top of the MPS window. The food chart shows that is one 150 g chicken breast, 200 g Greek yogurt, 3 eggs and a scoop of whey.

• A vegetarian runner who keeps falling short of protein

  You run 50 km a week, eat no meat, and weigh 62 kg. Tick "vegetarian" and pick "active": the tool nudges you toward 1.7 g/kg plus the 10% plant bump, about 116 g. The filtered chart drops chicken and shows tofu 8 g, tempeh 19 g and lentils 9 g per 100 g, so you can see you need real volume, not a token handful of edamame, to actually reach the number.

• A coach building meal targets for a 90 kg beginner client

  Your client is 90 kg, new to the gym, and wants to bulk. Enter the weight, pick "bulk" and "moderate", and you get about 180 g a day at 1.6 g/kg for hypertrophy. Set 5 meals and each lands near 36 g. You share the URL with the numbers baked in, and the client opens it on their phone with the per-meal split and food amounts already filled, no app to install.

• A 55 kg older parent worried about losing strength

  At 68 years old and 55 kg, you train twice a week and want to hold onto muscle. Pick "light" activity and "maintain": the tool suggests around 1.5 g/kg, about 83 g. It splits into 3 meals of roughly 28 g each, which matches research that older adults need a bigger per-meal dose to trigger the same muscle response. The chart turns that 28 g into 100 g salmon plus a 200 g pot of cottage cheese, so a meal you can actually picture.

Common pitfalls

• Using your current body weight when very overweight inflates the target. Protein is for lean mass, so a 120 kg person with high body fat should base the number closer to goal weight or use lean mass, not the full 120 kg.

• Hitting the daily total but dumping it into one or two huge meals. 100 g at dinner does not beat 4 meals of 30 g for muscle, because MPS saturates near 0.4 g/kg per sitting. Spread it across the meal count the tool gives you.

• Counting only "protein foods" and ignoring rice, bread and oats. Those background sources add 15 to 30 g a day, so people double up on chicken and overshoot when the food chart already accounts for the full picture.

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