Wednesday, December 4, 2013

4 Steps To Calculate Calories for Weight Loss

I think one of the reasons so many people “fail” at weight loss is because they just wing it. They try to make slightly better choices, skip dessert, and exercise more… but if you don’t know how many calories you are taking in and how many you burn each day, I believe it’s difficult to see consistent weight loss week in and week out.  It’s easy to underestimate how much you are eating, and overestimate how much you are burning. I lost almost 30 pounds after I had my second son, and managed to keep it off until I got pregnant with #3.  There is no way I would have been able to do that without clear calorie goals.  These are the steps I took to figure out how to create the calorie deficit required to burn fat.

To start, a pound of body fat equals approximately 3,500 calories.  So you need to create a deficit of this much to LOSE that one pound.

Step 1. Determine how many calories you require to maintain your current weight. 
There are many free calculators out there to help you do this. I would use a couple of different ones, and take an average of their answers. Here are a couple:
 
http://www.freedieting.com/tools/calorie_calculator.htm  (I think this one is a little low)
 
Step 2. Decide on a rate of weight loss.
This is personal. It depends on how much weight you have to lose, and how uncomfortable you are willing to get. For me…  I think feeling deprived is not a good thing, and I’ve never had more than 30 pounds to lose, so I stick to ½-1 pound of weight loss per week. 

Step 3. Calculate your daily calorie deficit requirement.
# of pounds you want to lose per week X 3,500 = Weekly calorie deficit
Weekly calorie deficit / 7 days in a week = daily calorie deficit
Example: 1 pound per week is 3,500 / 7, or 500 calories per day

Step  4. Calculate net calories.  
# calories required for weight maintenance (from step 1), MINUS the value from step 3. So if I weight 150 pounds and I require 1900 calories per day to stay at 150... if I want to lose one pound per week, I would subtract 500 from 1900... so I should be netting 1400 calories per day.

A note on "Net Calories" - this is the amount of calories you consume, minus how many you burn from exercise.  So if I eat 2100 calories, I would need to exercise to burn 700 to still hit my 1400 calories a day for weight loss.