Calorie Counting: How Many Calories Should I Eat A Day To Lose Weight?

Posted by Sammy on Dec 25, 2011 in Uncategorized | 2 comments

Those Trying To Lose Weight Have Certainly Heard The Age Old Question: “How Many Calories Should I Eat A Day To Lose Weight?”

I can just hear hear some of you chomping at the bit to ask the question “how many calories should I eat a day to lose weight?”

Many have been trained to believe that the only way to lose weight is to drastically cut your calories (thus your total food consumption) and some even espouse that you can eat junk and still lose weight as long as you’re under your weight maintenance calorie levels like the guys that came up with the “Twinkie diet”.

Makes sense on paper… Unfortunately that’s not always the case. Some people could use some calorie cutting and those are usually the people that are overeating or eating calorie dense junk foods very frequently. Others simply need to shift to healthier foods, higher fiber content and carb restriction later in the evening (or throughout the day), while maintaining the same calorie count to lose weight.

The reason why you don’t want to just jump into cutting calories is because for some that could drastically slow down their metabolism leading to even greater difficulty in losing weight. It’s hard to tell who’ll react negatively to cutting calories so i always suggest to start by cutting carbs and bumping up fiber content first, then if progress is still slow move on to consider cutting calories but even then do it gradually. I know that’s not what most people wanted to hear when they found this article but it’s simply the truth. Calorie cutting is not the end all be all weight loss tactic and although its all some people need to lose a good amount of weight it doesn’t work for everyone and can be especially bad for people who already have slow metabolisms as it can further slow their metabolism down.

So How Many Calories Should I Eat A Day To Lose Weight Already?

The amount of calories needed depends on ones daily activity levels and the amount of weight they want to lose. Aside from this, other factors to determine ones caloric needs are gender, Body Mass Index (BMI), Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR), and the caloric deficit one wants to achieve. The basal metabolic rate (BMR) is the minimum number of calories needed by the body to perform normal activities such as breathing and digestion.

The theory is that when a subject eats only the needed amount of calories based on their BMR (with daily activity levels factored in) on a daily basis that he or she does not lose or gain a pound. If he or she consumes more, it results in weight gain because the excess calories are stored inside the body as fat and if they eat less then they lose weight. So according to that all you need to do is figure out your BMR, take into account your daily activity levels, and subtract a few hundred calories for both activity levels and the rate at which you want to lose weight and it’ll just fall off. Unfortunately in all my years of training clients I’ve found that just cutting calories doesn’t cut it

My Recommendations

Before worrying so much about your calorie count try get your carbs in check first. Also try to cut carbs at around 5-7pm on most nights and minimize sugar and saturated fats. You might want to also be aware that some foods are very calorie dense like nuts, seeds, avocados, most fried foods, most sugary confections, pizza etc. Some of these foods can actually be pretty healthy (nuts, avocados, seeds) but its very easy to grab a handful of nuts (depending on the size of the “hand”) and put away 1000 calories in under 5 minutes. If that’s the case then monitoring you calorie intake might be necessary.

Either way carb count, cutting carbs at night and cutting sugar/saturated fats would be the first things on the list to do for those trying to lose weight.