How many calories to lose weight is the right question that you need to ask when designing a nutrition plan which will allow you to shed the kilos which you want to lose.
Each and every person is different and so the amount of calories you should be ingesting depends on the amount of muscle mass on your body. Men usually have more muscle mass and so they generally can eat more calories than women.
There are a number of steps which you should take when deciding how many calories to ingest and I will take you through a number of them so you will be able to figure out how many calories you should be eating in order for you to lose weight.
Step 1. Figure Out Your BMR – BMR stands for Basal Metabolic Rate. This is how many calories that your body burns just to exist. The act of your heart beating, breathing and digesting food burns calories and so once you figure out how many calories you burn just by existing you can have a baseline for how many calories to lose weight.
There are a number of formulas you can use, because the amount of calories you burn depends on how many muscles you have in your body. You will get the most accurate reading if you know your Body Fat Percentage. This is the percentage of your body mass (or total weight) which is pure fat. The rest of your total body weight is then your Lean Body Mass which is used to calculate your BMR. If you know your Lean Body Mass then Gender and Age does not come into the equation because you know exactly how much lean mass you have.
If you do not know your body fat percentage and then in turn your lean body mass you can use the Harris-Benedict formula. This formula uses averages for muscle mass depending on Gender and Age. This equation is quite accurate for the average person, but is not very accurate in the extremely muscular (it will underestimate lean body mass and therefore underestimate calories) and in the extremely overfat (it will overestimate lean body mass and therefore overestimate calories).
There are 2 formulas. One for men and one for women.
Men: BMR = 66 + (13.7 X weight in kg) + (5 X height in cm) – (6.8 X age in years)
Women: BMR = 655 + (9.6 X weight in kg) + (1.8 X heightt in cm) – (4.7 X age in years)
An example: I am a 35 year old woman. I weigh 70kg and I am 168cm tall.
I would use the formula for women and so my BMR = 655 + (9.6×70)+(1.8×168)-(4.7×35) = 655+672+302.4-164.5 = 1465 calories
If you know your body fat percentage and therefore your lean mass you can get the most accurate BMR of all. There is only one formula which is the Katch-McArdle formula.
BMR = 370 + (21.6 x Lean Body Mass)
An example: I am the same person as above, but I know my body fat percentage which is 28%. The formula uses lean body mass and so if 28% of my body weight is fat then the other 72% is my lean body mass. So 72%x70kg = 50.4kg of lean body mass.
Plugging this into the formula my BMR = 370 + (21.6 x 50.4) = 370 + 1088.64 = 1459 calories.
As you can see that is a bit less than using the Harris-Benedict formula.
Now imagine I am that same height, age etc but my body fat percentage was higher, meaning my total weight is less lean body mass and more fat. Imagine I have only 40kg of lean body mass instead of 50.4. Here my BMR would be 370 + (21.6 x 40) = 370 + 864 = 1234 calories. That is a difference of 200 calories less allowed each day which can make a big difference in weight loss efforts. That is why it is much more accurate when you know your body fat percentage.
2. Convert Your BMR to TDEE – Your BMR is the amount of calories your body burns at rest. This would be the amount of calories you burn if you were just laying in bed all day and not moving. Of course everyone (unless they are in a coma) has some amount of exercise such as walking to the toilet, brushing your teeth and more depending on the type of work that you do. Someone who has a physical job would burn more calories in a usual day than someone who just sits in front of their desk in an office. Your TDEE is your total daily energy expenditure. To work out the amount of calories you burn in a day going about your usual business you must then multiply your BMR by an activity factor to get your TDEE.
Activity factors are the following:
Sedentary = BMR X 1.2 (little or no exercise, desk job)
Lightly active = BMR X 1.375 (light exercise/sports 1-3 days/wk)
Mod. active = BMR X 1.55 (moderate exercise/sports 3-5 days/wk)
Very active = BMR X 1.725 (hard exercise/sports 6-7 days/wk)
Extra Active = BMR X 1.9 (hard daily exercise/sports & physical job or 2X day training, i.e marathon, contest etc.)
From the example above if my BMR is 1459 calories and I really only have a desk job then I would use the Sedentary Activity Multiplier and my TDEE would be 1459×1.2 = 1750 calories
This means that going about my normal business my body needs 1750 calories per day to maintain my current weight.
3. Determine My Calorie Defecit – The basic law of calories is that to lose weight you need to consume less calories than you burn. If I was the person in the above example, then going about my normal duties I would need to consume less than 1750 calories to lose weight. The amount of your defecit then determines how much weight you would lose. There is a point to be aware of and that’s when you make your defecit too large. If you eat more than 20% less calories than your body needs you can actually go into starvation mode. This is when your body thinks you are not getting enough food and instead of burning fat it will actually burn up your muscles. This is not what you want, because more muscle mass means more fat burning. If you lose your muscle mass then you will actually kill your metabolism and your BMR will reduce meaning that you need to eat less calories each day. The best way to go about it is to have a 10 – 15% defecit. That way your body will not go into stavation mode. You should then burn off more calories by exercising. In the case above a 10% defecit is 175 calories less than the 1750 needed and so your intake would be 1575 calories for weight loss.
You should monitor your BMR, because as you lose weight or put on muscle mass from exercising your BMR will change and you will need to adjust your calorie intake.
Maintaining a calorie defecit is just the beginning to applying proper nutrition to lose weight. Do you know what macronutrient ratios are? What calorie zig zagging is? The times of day you eat those calories makes a difference as well as the number of meals you split them up into. Exercising then plays a part in getting the fastest results from your weight loss plan. Resistance training is great because it burns fat and builds more muscle mass which then means you can eat more. It’s strange because the more fat you lose the more you can eat!
Click on the Home Link. I explain to you how I lost 30 kg once I got all the information I needed to know what the best things to do to lose weight are.
If you want to get the fastest and healthiest weight loss then you should check out Burn The Fat Feed The Muscle. It is the best guide out there to show you what you need to do!
