How To Calculate Calories To Lose Weight

In this blog I'm going to walk you through exactly how to calculate how many calories you need to eat in a day depending on whether you want to maintain, gain or lose weight. This calculation will be specific to you. So if you follow along, we're going to take a look at your age, height, weight, sex, and specific goal, and that's how we're going to get that number that is specific to you. Grab something to take notes with and let's get started!

Step one is to calculate your BMR, which stand for Basal Metabolic Rate. Your BMR is essentially how many calories your body burns at rest. I’m using a website linked here to help me with this calculation: http://www.bmi-calculator.net/bmr-cal...

As an example we will use a woman who is 35 years old, 140 pounds, 5'4''. So we plug that information into the website, but I want you to plug in your specific information in order to get your specific numbers. We are using the Oxford calculation. So we type all that in and we get a BMR of 1,313calories. That means that's how many calories she burns per day if all she does is stay at rest.

Step two, where we're actually calculating how many calories you burn in the day. It’s called your TDEE, or your Total Daily Energy Expenditure. You multiply your BMR by an activity factor, and this is using the Oxford Equation. And the key here is to be really honest with yourself about how active you are. Most people are overestimating how much activity and exercise they're doing on a weekly basis. As you can see, there are different categories all the way from no activity to very, very active. https://www.bmi-calculator.net/tdee-calculator/

Pick the level that best suits you. in this example I am choosing moderate, which gives me a Total Daily Energy Expenditure of 2,035 calories. So that is how many calories this woman is burning per day.

Step 3, the final step, is to determine your specific calorie goal. So this is where you will take into consideration if you are trying to maintain, gain or lose weight and adjust accordingly. So to maintain your weight you would continue to burn this many calories a day and you would eat the same amount (2,035 calories).

In order to lose weight, we have to consume fewer calories than we burn so calories in through food is lower than our calories out. And to gain we of course eat more than we burn.

In our current example, calories burned is 2,035 a day. So if this woman's goal is to lose weight, then the question becomes, how low should you go? We can figure this out with simple math. One pound of fat equals 3,500 calories. So in order to determine how much fat you're going to lose per week, you will divide that number of calories that equals those pounds of fat by seven. So if you wanted to lose 1 pound of fat per week, you would divide 3,500 by 7, which would give us 500 calories.

So, that means that we have to eat 500 fewer calories than we burn per day. I know it might sound slow, but it's not. Losing a pound every single week is amazing progress and the only reason people think it's slow is because we've been conditioned to think that we can get these fast results by all these quick fix fitness professionals and reality TV shows. The general safe recommendation is between 1-2 lbs a week, but of course check with your health care provider if you have questions or concerns that you need to take into consideration. Anything beyond that and you could potentially be having negative health effects and it’s unsustainable which usually leads to us quitting and then gaining the weight back anyway.

Remember to do this with your numbers, but for this example, I'm going to take her TDEE of 2,035 and subtract 500 calories from that to get her a pound per week weight loss goal. So In this case the daily calorie intake should be about 1,535.

You don't need to be really strict if you're tracking calories, you don't have to hit it on the single calorie mark every single day, it’s more about the weekly goal so you can be a little bit flexible. There's no reason you should be obsessing over hitting every single little number.

The thing to keep in mind is all of these calculations are not 100% accurate, but we use this number as a base line, as a starting point. So when you start tracking your calories and you're hitting your calories consistently, you can use the scale weight as a gauge to see how accurate this number was and then adjust from there.

So if you are eating at a 500 calorie deficit every day for two weeks, and you don't see a change on the scale, it's not that you're doing something wrong, it's that that number may have not been perfectly accurate. So I recommend following your calorie range for at least two weeks, assessing your results, and if you haven't seen the results that you should expect, then adjust your calories by 250 and evaluate if you are expending as much energy as you put into the calculator and make those adjustments as well.

Once you start seeing' results, do not drop your calories anymore, unless you stop seeing results for a significant amount of time. The scale weight naturally fluctuates, so we don't want to make changes too quickly.

If you get frustrated and you don't know what you're doing wrong, something's not clicking, I can be a resource for you, so reach out to me if you feel you need it. Sometimes it could be really nice to have a coach to just do it for you. But I promise you can do it on your own if you put your mind to it.