More than most general advice suggests. A four-week randomized trial that put two groups on the same significant deficit and the same training found the group eating roughly 2.4 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight a day gained lean mass while losing fat. The group eating about half that held steady instead. The gap between those two outcomes is the entire case for why recomposition has its own protein number, higher than the one most people have heard.
The short answer
Somewhere around 2.2 to 2.4 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight a day is the range the strongest controlled trial on this question actually tested and found effective, specifically for people combining a real deficit with resistance training. That's noticeably higher than the roughly 1.6 grams per kilogram that general muscle-building research finds is enough when you're not dieting. The deficit is what moves the number. Less spare energy means your body needs a stronger amino acid signal to justify building or even keeping muscle tissue.
The trial that put a number on it
The clearest evidence comes from a 2016 study in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. Forty young men trained six days a week while eating on a substantial energy deficit for four weeks, split into two groups that differed only in protein intake, roughly 2.4 grams per kilogram versus roughly 1.2. Everything else, training volume, total training days, and the size of the deficit, was matched. Longland and colleagues found the higher-protein group gained about 1.2 kilograms of lean mass over the four weeks while still losing fat. The lower-protein group essentially held their lean mass steady instead of gaining any, on the same deficit and the same training.
That's a controlled head-to-head test with everything but protein held constant, which is rare in nutrition research and part of why this specific number gets cited so often.
Why it's higher than the usual advice
Most general protein guidance for building muscle comes from research done at maintenance or in a calorie surplus, where the body already has spare energy available to build new tissue with. A 2018 systematic review and meta-regression in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, pooling data across dozens of resistance training studies, found that muscle and strength gains plateaued at around 1.6 grams per kilogram a day in that context. Morton and colleagues found little extra benefit from pushing higher than that once training and total energy were adequate.
A deficit removes that spare energy. Without it, the amino acid signal from protein has to do more of the work of telling your body which tissue to protect, and the research on deficits consistently finds that job takes more protein, not less. This is the entire reason recomposition and general muscle building have different numbers attached to them, even though people often use the terms as if they mean the same thing.
Same training. Same deficit. The only thing that moved was protein, and it was the only thing that needed to.
What the number looks like in food
For someone around 70 kilograms, roughly 2.4 grams per kilogram works out to somewhere near 170 grams of protein a day, spread across meals. In practical terms that's something like a palm-sized portion of chicken, fish, eggs, or Greek yogurt at each of three or four meals, not one enormous protein-only meal. Our list of how to set your own protein floor goes through how to scale the number to your own body weight rather than borrowing someone else's target.
It's a meaningfully bigger number than most people are used to eating, and getting there usually means treating protein as the first thing you plan a meal around rather than a side consideration.
Is there a ceiling
The research doesn't find a hard ceiling in this range for healthy adults, but there's also no evidence that going meaningfully higher than about 2.4 grams per kilogram buys you anything extra. Past a certain point, extra protein just gets used for energy or excreted rather than building more tissue, since the limiting factor becomes training stimulus and recovery, not amino acid availability. The Longland trial's higher group is close to the upper end of what the evidence actually supports, not a floor to beat.
Getting there without tracking calories
You can hit this number without counting a single calorie, which matters because recomposition research keeps circling back to protein as the variable that moves outcomes, not overall calorie precision. What decides whether a day worked is whether protein landed where it needed to, not whether the day's total energy was tracked to the gram. That's a deliberate design choice behind OffRamp: log protein, not calories, because the trial evidence points at protein as the lever that actually changes body composition on a deficit.
The practical hurdle is usually planning, not appetite. Building each meal around a protein source first, then filling in vegetables and carbohydrate around it, gets most people to their number without much extra thought. A rough mental split of four roughly equal protein-forward meals also happens to line up with separate research on how the body uses protein for muscle building across the day, which we cover in our piece on how often you should eat. Batching a few staples ahead of time, eggs, cooked chicken, Greek yogurt, tends to matter more for hitting the number consistently than any single meal decision does.
How OffRamp helps
OffRamp sets your protein floor from your own body weight rather than handing you a generic number, and it tracks it as a running daily total no matter how many meals you split it across. There's no calorie counter and no macro breakdown competing for your attention, because the research behind recomposition points at one number that matters most. Regain Radar then reads your weigh-ins as a trend, so the months where the scale barely moves, which is exactly what recomposition looks like, don't get mistaken for a stall.
