How many calories should I eat each day to lose weight?
The first question most people ask when trying to lose weight is how many calories they should be eating each day to lose weight. Well the answer might surprise you because most people think there's a set number of calories you should be eating to lose weight. Less than 2000 would be the amount most people would guess. But the right answer to the question is it really depends on so many different factors.
It depends on your goals
Determining how many calories you need to eat per day depends on many different factors and depending on what your goals are it will be different for every person. Do you want to get lean, build muscle, maintain your current weight or build muscle and get cut at the same time? These factors are what will determine what your daily caloric needs are in order to maximize your results. To make matters worse, even if you are the same weight, age, height and sex as someone else and with the same goals, the caloric needs can still be different.
In this article you will learn how to calculate your personal caloric needs so that you can make sure you are eating the correct number or calories and macro nutrients to help you get the results you want to achieve. And it all starts with calculating your TDEE or Total Daily Energy Expenditure. Read on to learn exactly how to calculate it to fit your personal goals.
Once you have your correct number, you can figure out how many calories you need in order to get the results you're looking to achieve. If that's weight loss you need to be in a caloric deficit so that your energy balance is in the negatives, this way your body will have to burn body fat from its fat stores in order to come up with those missing calories and balance its energy. For muscle gain you need to be in a caloric surplus or your body won't have enough energy to increase its mass, it too will have to tap into stored energy reserves for fuel.
First, in order to know how many calories you need to eat to lose weight or gain muscle, you need to know how many calories are in body fat. 1 pound of body fat contains 3500 calories, so for you to lose 1 pound a week your energy balance will need to be negative 3500 for the week. To Lose 2 pounds a week, it will need to be negative 7000 calories.
Calories to build muscle
Now building muscle is a little different and you can only build around 1 pound of muscle every 4-6 weeks. But muscle building uses a lot of calories so if you don't eat enough, you can actually lose muscle instead of gain. So a good rule of thumb when trying to build muscle is to eat about 500 calories a day over your maintenance. This way you won't lose muscle but you'll also limit the amount of body fat you gain when you're eating in a caloric surplus and trying to build muscle.
You don't want to end up getting fat when you're trying to get your swole on, you want to be as lean as possible. Also, you will have less body fat to lose when you start cutting and trying to reduce your body fat percentage.
And all of this is based on one how many calories you're burning daily.
it’s the sum total of 4 energy systems
Now the way we figure this number out is by calculating your TDEE or your Total Daily Energy Expenditure. It's the sum total of 4 different energy systems within your body that power your daily activities without you even knowing it's happening. To give you an idea of how many calories your body is using on a daily basis, here are the 4 energy systems and what they contribute to your TDEE.
basal medabolic rate (bmr)
The first system is your basal metabolic rate or BMR. This is the amount of energy or calories your body needs just to run its everyday functions like breathing and maintaining your proper body temperature, this one specially accounts for the majority of your calories burned daily. It keeps all your systems going like heart, lungs, kidneys etc. If you were to do nothing but lie in bed all day, this is the amount of energy or calories you would need just to stay alive.
Your BMR makes up 60-70% of your TDEE.
thermic effect of food (TEF)
The next system is the thermic effect of food or TEF. This is the amount of energy or calories it takes for your body to digest the food you eat. It's kind of like when you put gas in your car and the engine has to work a little harder to digest it and convert it into energy for your car. Your body uses about 10% of your TDEE just to digest the food you eat.
Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis (neat)
The third system is Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis or neat. This is the amount of calories you burn from activity that is not considered structured exercise. This includes things like walking the dog, walking around or walking up a set of stairs. It can also include things like fidgeting and even shivering. You use about 20-30% of your TDEE on NEAT.
Thermic effect of activity (tea)
The last system is the thermic effect of activity or TEA. This is the amount of energy or calories you use when you are performing physical activities such as lifting weights, doing cardio, playing sports or even mowing the lawn. The more physical activity you do each day greatly increases the amount of calories you are burning. You can burn more calories in a day from physical exercise than your body burns by itself. That would be an extreme workout regimen where you would be working out for almost the entire day with very little rest in between workouts.
Some elite athletes are at this level when training for a specific goal. As an example, the gold medal winning US olympic swimmer Michael Phelps needs between 10-12 thousand calories per day to maintain his weight and recover properly when he’s training for the olympics. This many calories for an average person would cause them to gain weight and become extremely over weight if continued for a long period of time. That’s why everyone’s caloric needs can be so different from each other, and why you must calculate yours to achieve the results you want.
Now that we know how many calories we burn on a daily basis, we can start to figure out how many calories we need in total to maintain our current weight as it currently stands today. The first step is to figure out how many calories we need in order to maintain our current weight is to calculate your basal metabolic rate or BMR.
your bmr burns 70-80% of your calories
Your BMR is based on many different variables and even if you're the same gender, weight and height as someone else, you both can still have a different BMR. Your BMR can change depending on how many calories you consume daily, this is called metabolic adaptation. It's the main thing that causes you to enter a weight loss plateau after you've been on a diet for some time and your results start to slow down.
The good news is that this is the easiest and fastest thing that you can fix to help you increase your TDEE and get your body burning fat again and losing weight. But first you need to know what that number actually is so you can see if you need to make an adjustment with your workout or diet. Let's get into that now.
There are a few different formulas that we can use to calculate our BMR but for the sake of simplicity, we will use the most common one. The Harris-Benedict equation looks like this:
For men: BMR = 66 + (13.7 x weight in kg) + (5 x height in cm) - (6.8 x age in years)
For women: BMR = 655 + (9.6 x weight in kg) + (1.8 x height in cm) - (4.7 x age in years)
Let's say we have a 30 year old woman who weighs 60kg, is 5'2 and goes to gym 3 days a week for around an hour, doing a combination of weight training and cardio. She wants to know her TDEE so she can make sure she is eating the correct number of calories to support her workout and lose weight without going too far into a calorie deficit. We would use the following formula to find out what her TDEE is.
BMR = 655 + (9.6 x 60) + (1.8 x 162) - (4.7 x 30) = 1421 calories
Now we need to figure out how many calories she burns from exercise and daily living activities. As a rule of thumb, someone who goes to the gym 3 days a week will burn an extra 300 calories per day on top of their BMR and someone who works at a desk all day will burn around 200 extra calories per day on top of their BMR. So our equation now looks like this:
1421 + 300 + 200 = 1921 calories
1921 is the number of calories that our woman needs to eat each day in order to support her current body weight as it stands right now. But remember, this number changes depending on your current weight so you need to recalculate it every few weeks to make sure it's accurate to help you continue with the results you want. Whether that's weight loss or muscle gain, it needs to be adjusted or your results will slow down or even stop completing.
subtract 500 calories a day to lose weight
Now let's figure out how many calories this woman needs to eat everyday in order to lose 1 pound of body fat per week. Remember, 1 pound of body fat is equal to 3500 calories. So if we want to lose 1 pound each week we need to eat 3500 calories less than our maintenance level of 1921 calories per day. So we do the math:
1921 - 500 = 1421 calories
This means that this woman needs to eat 1421 calories each day in order to lose 1 pound of body fat per week.
how many calories to build muscle
Now let's figure out how many calories this 6ft male weighing 170 pounds and lifting weights 4 days a week with no cardio will need to eat in order to build about 1 pound of muscle every month. We'll use the same formulas as above:
First we calculate his maintenance level. He can use a body weight calculator and found that he needs to eat about 2588 calories per day to maintain his current weight. Then we need to figure out how many calories he needs to eat on days he works out and days he doesn't. Remember, if you're lifting weights 4 days per week you'll need about 20% more calories on those days than on your rest days or non-lifting days. So we do the math:
2588 * 1.2 = 3105
2588 * 1 = 2588
4 x 3105 = 12420
3 x 2588 = 7764
Then add them up and divide by 7 days.
12420 + 7764 = 20184
20184 ÷ 7 = 2883
This means that this man will need about 2883 calories a day just to maintain his current body weight when lifting 4 days per week. This will make sure he has enough calories to recover and build muscle but not too many where he will put on extra body fat and increase his body's fat percentage.
The final step is to figure out how many calories he will need to eat each day in order to gain about 1 pound of muscle every month. Remember to build muscle, you'll want to add 500 calories a day to your TDEE. So he'll need 3383 calories per day in order to build 1 pound of muscle every month.
you can eat 20% more on workout days to gain muscle
Now an easier and better way to do this is by increasing the calories by 20% on workout days so you're eating more on training days and less on off days. Think about it. Why should you be eating the same amount of calories on days you're lifting weights for an hour as days you're just sitting around all day. You shouldn't and this is the best way to solve that problem.
If you’re looking to lose weight you should eat make sure you are eating in a caloric deficit but still eat more on workout days and less on off days. A simple way you can do this by calculating the TDEE without the adding in the calories burned from the workout. Then take that number and add 500 calories on workout days and subtract 500 calories on off days. This should put you in a 500 calorie deficit over the week and you should lose about 1lb of body fat every week. To lose 2lbs a week, first subtract 500 calories from the TDEE then do the same thing with adding calories on your workout days.
conclusion
Now remember estimating your TDEE is just that, an estimate and can be adjusted as needed. It's not going to be 100% accurate but it will give you a good starting place. Your metabolism is constantly changing depending on how much muscle you have and how active you are. The only way to really know how many calories you need is to track your weight, body fat percentage, and how your clothes fit over time. If the scale isn't going up or down then you'll need to adjust your calories until it does.
Now that you know what TDEE is you can use the formulas discussed in this article to figure out what yours is. You've learned that everything from how much you sleep to how much you exercise per day can affect the total. But by knowing this number you can more confidently create a nutrition plan based on your goals to help maximize your results and reach your body and fitness goals.
By having this power you don't have to follow any cookie cutter diets provided by the latest instagram fitness influencer. You can create one that's customized for your goals and your needs. Knowing that you can use it to either build muscle or lose weight and eat the foods you love while still staying within your nutrition requirements to achieve those goals.
Now that you have the knowledge to calculate how many calories you are burning in a day you have the power. Now it's up to you to use it to achieve the goals you desire by putting this information into practice and applying it to your dietary needs. Now it's up to you to craft your ideal physique.
