The ranges, honestly

Protein advice sounds precise but arrives in ranges:

0.8 g per kg of body weight — the RDA. A floor against deficiency, not an optimum for anyone training or dieting.
1.2–1.6 g/kg — the usual recommendation for active people, and for anyone in a calorie deficit: protein is what protects muscle while the weight comes off.
1.6–2.2 g/kg — for building muscle. Meta-analyses put the point of diminishing returns near 1.6 g/kg; the rest of the range is insurance.

The honest summary: the distance between 0.9 and 1.6 g/kg is where the results live. The distance between 1.6 and 2.2 is fine-tuning, paid for in a lot of extra chicken.

For an 80 kg person, 1.6 g/kg is 128 g of protein a day. Which raises the real question: can you eat 128 g of protein on a Tuesday with two meetings and nothing meal-prepped?

Why you miss the target (it’s breakfast)

Look at where protein sits in a typical day. A toast, porridge, or pastry breakfast: 10–15 g. A decent lunch: 30–40 g. Which leaves dinner to deliver 70–80 g — roughly 250 g of cooked chicken. Nobody does that daily, and the days you don’t are the days the target quietly dies.

People who hit protein targets aren’t more disciplined at dinner. They have a boring, repeatable, high-protein breakfast. Eggs, cottage cheese, skyr, yesterday’s meat — 30–40 g before noon changes the whole day’s arithmetic. Dinner now only has to be normal.

There’s a tracking bonus hiding in “repeatable”: in Calsheet, save that breakfast once as a custom food or a recipe, and logging it on a weekday morning is two taps.

What Calsheet suggests by default — and when to use your own number

The TDEE wizard turns your profile into a daily calorie budget and splits it 30/30/40 into protein, fat, and carbs by calories. At a 2,000 kcal budget that’s 150 g of protein — about 1.9 g/kg for an 80 kg person. A deliberately high bar.

The lean toward protein makes sense (in a deficit it’s the macro doing the most work: satiety, muscle retention), but the number isn’t sacred. In Settings the budget itself is what’s editable; the macro targets follow from it. Which is fine, because the number you actually manage is your average. Two cases worth handling:

If 150 g reads as fantasy, treat 1.4–1.6 g/kg of your own body weight as your bar and manage the 7- and 30-day average protein in Stats against it. A target you hit at 100% beats a target you hit at 60%.
If you’re cutting on a small budget and weigh over ~85 kg, watch the grams: at 1,600 kcal, 30% is only 120 g, and the derived target drifts below 1.4 g/kg. That’s when your own gram number becomes the one to watch, not the app’s.

Judge weeks, not days

A protein target isn’t a daily pass/fail exam. Muscle doesn’t audit your Tuesday; it responds to the month.

Calsheet’s stats show average protein over 7 and 30 days, and that average is the number to manage. A 90 g day inside a week averaging 140 g is noise. A month averaging 100 g against a 150 g target is a real gap — and it gets fixed at breakfast, not with willpower.

Five moves that survive weekdays

Fix breakfast first. 30+ g before noon and half the problem is gone.
Repeat meals shamelessly. The same weekday breakfast and lunch is a nutrition win and a logging win at once.
Aim for 25–40 g per meal instead of back-loading dinner.
Stock protein that needs no cooking — cottage cheese, skyr, canned fish, protein yogurt. Nearly all of it is barcoded, so logging it is a scan.
Watch the weekly average; adjust the target monthly, not after every rough day.

The best protein target is the slightly unambitious one you hit for six months straight. The ambitious one you abandon in February doesn’t count.