How Many Calories Should I Eat to Lose Weight?

Claudia — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 14:32:57 +0000

How many calories should I eat to lose weight?

Help – How many calories should I eat?

If you are wondering “How many calories should I eat to lose weight?”, the first thing you must get clear on is how many calories your body needs to sustain your current weight. It is surprising that most people do not have a faint idea how much they can eat without putting on pounds. And secondly, you obviously need to know how many calories you are consuming in average at the moment, and here again most people do not have a clue about their calorie intake.

So, let us start to bring some clarity to your question “How many calories should I eat to lose weight?”!

calories needed for maintenance=

your basal metabolic rate (BMR) x your activity level

Your basal metabolic rate (BMR) is the amount of calories that your body needs to survive without any activity. Say, if you are lying in hospital with a coma, your daily calorie consumption would very much equal your basal metabolic rate.

Your BMR depends on several factors like

your current weight – the good news is that for every pound that you are currently weighting, you also need to eat calories just to keep that weight
your height – it obviously makes a difference if your weight is spread over 1,60 m or 2 m, meaning even if Tom Cruise and Michael Jordan had the same weight, their BMR would be different
your gender – men have a higher percentage of muscles, which means that they burn more calories per pound of bodyweight. Unfair, I know, but nothing we can do about it.
your age – your metabolism slows down the older you get! Take advantage of that and start your life changing diet now, because next year it is getting even harder!

Your activity level is rated raging between 1.2 (sedentary) and 1.9 (highly active, excessive exercise or hard manual labor) and factored into the equation.

Example:

Let’s say you are a 25 years old female with a height of 165 cm/ 5’5” and a current weight of 65 kilos/ 130 pounds. Your activity level is lightly active (1-3x sports per week) and now you start asking “How many calories should I eat to lose weight?”

Your BMR is then about 1,400 calories x 1.375 for your activity level = 1,925 calories

Now, that you know how many calories you can eat per day for maintenance, it is getting easy. For every pound of weight that you want to lose, you theoretically have to cut 3,500 calories. That means for a successful weight loss of one pound per week, you need to eat 500 calories less then your maintenance per day. In the above case your daily calorie consumption will be limited to 1,425 calories.