How Many Calories Do You Need?
How many calories should I be eating?
I have been trying to get a handle of how many calories I should be eating day to day for sustained weight loss. In my research I’ve read quite a few articles on caloric intake and eating habits. In my body formulas post I spoke about BMR and how to find out how many calories one needs for weight maintenance. Counting those calories is very important.
Well, in order to consistently lose weight we will have to monitor our BMR as our weight changes. Basically, As we lose weight the number of calories change. In order for us to reduce our caloric intake by healthy number we should reduce our calories by no more than 500 calories. 1000 calories for some individuals is to0 drastic and could cause emotional and physical problems and ultimately lead to binge eating. Not a good place to be in.
So for example, for an individual who’s BMR is 2100 calories, a healthy reduction would be 1600 calorie diet. As the pounds come off we can reset this number by using the handy dandy BMR calculator and Harris Benedict Equation to get our new caloric intake numbers. As a guide to minimum calorie intake, the American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM) recommends calorie levels never drop below 1200 calories per day for women or 1800 calories per day for men. Even these calorie levels are quite low.
An alternative way of calculating a safe minimum calorie-intake level is by reference to your current body weight. Reducing calories by 15-20% below your daily calorie maintenance needs or BMR is a useful start. You may increase this depending on your weight loss goals.
Not only should we be watching this number, we should be watching how and what we eat. How many macro-nutrients are we getting with each meal? How many meals should we be eating to keep our metabolism moving and burning off that fat? All of this is important. My next post will discuss the foods we eat and what it does to our bodies. Not any meal will do.
As I said in my previous post, its calories in and calories out. We are looking to burn that magical number of 3500 calories to lose a pound. So calories in (your diet) and calories out (your workout) will help you lose weight and keep losing it. Until the next episode.
Monti
*Some individuals do calorie cycles in or to keep the body guessing. There are many theories about this and it has been proven to work. I may discuss this at a later date. In the meantime, Google has numerous articles about cycling calories so feel free to do a search.