QUOTA
The daily protein that protects your muscle. Needs your weight and a goal. If you've run TAPE, it doses off lean mass instead of bodyweight.
The one macro worth counting
Your daily protein target, dosed off lean mass when TAPE has given us one and off bodyweight when it has not. If you only ever track one number in your food, track this one — it is the difference between losing fat and losing the thing you spent two years building.
Hit the range, not the decimal. Anywhere between the low and high figure does the job, and consistency across the week beats precision on any single day.
Spread it over roughly four feedings rather than stacking it at dinner — muscle protein synthesis responds to each dose, so four servings of forty grams outperform one enormous plate of a hundred and sixty.
Counterintuitive and well established: the leaner you get and the harder you diet, the more protein you need. In a deficit your body is looking for tissue to break down, and a high protein intake plus resistance training is what tells it to take the fat and leave the muscle.
This is why the cut band sits higher than the bulk band. Nobody expects that the first time they see it.
These bands come from studies on trained people in controlled conditions, and the top of the range is deliberately generous — the evidence for gains above roughly 1.6 g/kg of bodyweight gets thin fast. If the high number is unrealistic for how you actually eat, the low number is still a good day's work.
More is not better. Past these ranges you are buying expensive urine, and displacing carbohydrate you would have trained better on.
One genuine caveat: high protein intakes are well tolerated by healthy kidneys and are not well tolerated by compromised ones. If you have any kidney condition, this number is a conversation for your doctor, not for a website.
Estimates, not diagnoses. These figures describe averages and your body is not one. Nothing here treats, cures or prevents anything — and if you are managing a health condition, taking medication, or working through a relationship with food, talk to a professional before acting on a number a website gave you.