How much protein in grams do I need at 124 kg on 1,100 kcal a day?

Concretely: 124 kg · 1,100 kcal.

I want the working, not the result — I need to be able to redo it with different numbers.

I care about the precision as well as the value — I want to know how many figures are real.

Where is my error, and what is the correct working?

The mechanism is worth having straight, because it predicts which interventions can work and which cannot.

The regain trajectory after stopping is roughly a mirror of the loss trajectory, and it is not primarily a willpower phenomenon. Appetite signalling returns, energy expenditure remains suppressed relative to the original mass, and the two combine. That is an argument for a maintenance plan existing before the stop, rather than an argument against stopping.

Stated carefully, the minimum effective resistance-training dose in a deficit is lower than most programmes assume. Two sessions a week covering the major movement patterns, with loads taken close to failure, is sufficient to retain most of what would otherwise be lost. Volume beyond that adds recovery cost that a large energy deficit is poorly placed to pay.

Adaptive thermogenesis — a fall in energy expenditure beyond that predicted by the change in body composition — is documented across weight-loss interventions and is the mechanistic basis for the plateau being expected rather than anomalous.

Worth stating that a DEXA sequence is only as good as its protocol consistency, and most people’s sequences are not consistent enough to support the conclusions drawn from them.

Train, eat the protein, measure something functional, and give the trend three months before you interpret it.

Start with the arithmetic, because the answer to the practical question is usually a number and the number is usually achievable.

The first four weeks of loss is substantially fluid and glycogen. Each gram of stored glycogen carries roughly three grams of water, and total glycogen is on the order of 400 to 500 g, so the obligatory water shift alone accounts for a couple of kilograms. This is why the first month looks dramatic and the second looks like a plateau when in fact the fat-loss rate has not changed.

Food noise returning is not obviously tolerance. Receptor desensitisation is one hypothesis; a second is that the initial effect was partly novelty and partly the steep early deficit, and a third is that intake has drifted upward and the signal is being outcompeted rather than weakened. The three make different predictions about what a dose increase would do.

I would be careful with the supplement literature here; effect sizes are small, the studies are mostly in trained young men, and generalisation to a large deficit is not obviously valid.

Measure strength as well as mass. It is cheaper, it is less noisy, and it is closer to what you actually care about.

Specifically, a plateau at four to six months is the expected shape of the curve, not a failure of it. Energy expenditure falls with mass, and the deficit closes itself unless intake falls further.

Cardio does not interfere with lean-mass retention at the volumes anyone here is doing; the interference effect in the literature appears at high concurrent volumes in trained athletes. What cardio does at a large deficit is add to the deficit, which is either the point or a problem depending on the objective.

The STEP 1 extension reported substantial regain in the year after treatment withdrawal, with weight and cardiometabolic variables trending back toward baseline[1].

Two resistance sessions a week and a protein target you actually hit will do more than any refinement beyond them.