How many calories do you need per day?
If you’ve tried to lose weight, then you know the basic calculation; one pound is 3500 calories. So, let’s say that you want to lose one pound a week, then you cut 500 calories per day. Easy, right?
Except. How do you know how many calories you’re already eating per day? Can you safely cut more than 500, or is 500 too much to cut?
The first thing you need to know isn’t how many calories to cut. It’s how many calories you need to eat per day to maintain your current weight.
Calculate It
You can use something like the Calories per day Calculator to get an approximation. Most of these calculators will take into account your sex, age and activity level in making the estimate.
Age: In general, the older you get the fewer calories you burn.
Sex: Men will tend to burn more calories than women because of their higher muscle mass.
Activity Level: This one is obvious. Higher activity levels mean you burn more calories.
You can also get a rough estimate simply by multiplying your weight by 10.
Try a few calculators and the multiply by 10 method. You won’t get results that match exactly, but your numbers should hover around a particular range.
Observe It
This method takes longer, but I think it’s more accurate. Take a couple of weeks, maybe a month, and track everything you eat.
- Be careful to weigh and measure your food and calculate your calories correctly.
- Don’t change your diet or exercise.
- Weigh each week and verify that your weight isn’t changing.
This method is more difficult, but it should give you a good estimate of how many calories you can eat. Compare it to the calculations you did in the first section and see how close they are.
One benefit to this method is if you have a particularly slow metabolism, you’re likely to get a more accurate result. Also, you’ll benefit from developing a habit of journaling what you eat!
Daily Calories vs. Average Daily Calories
It’s tempting to think of calories as something that you should watch from day to day, but it’s really the overall effect of your calories that matters.
We’ve all experience this, I’m sure. You eat a huge meal, weigh the next morning and find that you’ve gained a pound or two. You think that it was your binge the previous day, but that isn’t really possible, unless you ate a 7000 calorie meal! (2 pounds x 3500 calories each)
What’s more likely is that you gained some water weight from the big meal, and that it will resolve itself in a few days. OR, you’ve been eating more calories than you ought to for more than one day, and you’ve truly gained 2 pounds.
Watching your AVERAGE daily calories over a period of at least a week will let you keep things in perspective. Let’s say you plan on eating 1500 calories a day, but you have one day in the week where you ate about 2000 calories. That’s bad, right?
Not necessarily, if you were able to keep your average down around 1500. So, maybe you ate only 1400 calories for a few days to make up for the splurge. I find this way of tracking calories more realistic. It allows me to not feel as if I’ve failed when I exceed my daily goals.
Wrap Up
To sum up, this is what I’m doing.
- I’m tracking what I eat this month to develop the food journaling habit and determine how many calories I can eat per day and maintain my weight.
- I’ll use those figures to determine what calorie count I should aim for each day.
- I’ll focus on my weekly calorie average, not the daily calorie count, to track how I’m doing.
