How to Determine the Number of Calories You Need to Eat to Lose Weight
When you’re on a diet, determining how much you need to eat can be like playing the calorie roulette wheel. Many people turn to a calorie calculator, but they can grossly overestimate the amount of food needed to lose weight. Here’s how to calculate your goal.
Step one: find your “calorie maintenance”
Weight loss is based on the concept of calories. Simply put, a calorie is a unit of energy. You burn calories when you go about your daily life, doing everything from exercise to simple breathing and keeping you alive. You consume calories when you eat or drink high-calorie foods.
Broadly speaking, the basics of losing weight and gaining weight are simple: when you eat more calories than you consume (in this case, you have a “calorie surplus”), you gain weight. Conversely, when you consume more calories than you eat (in which case you are in a “calorie deficit”), you lose weight.
So, in order to maintain the same weight, you need to find your “calorie content”: the area in which the calories you consume are equal to the calories you consume.
There are two ways to determine the amount of calories you need. The first is a calorie calculator. However, if you’ve used calorie calculators before, you may have noticed that they can grossly overestimate the amount of calories you need to eat daily to lose weight. This is in part because they don’t take into account the amount of muscle or lean body mass you currently have.
A person with a higher lean body mass will have a higher calorie content than a person with a lower lean body mass, all other things being equal. I recommend the exrx calculator , which is more accurate than most calculators as it includes ” Lean Body Mass “. Therefore, for best results, be sure to enter your approximate body fat percentage. If you don’t know yours, you can find out by following Lee Peel ‘s guide here .
Alternatively, you can also use these handy lookup tables, which I modeled based on customer data. While this lookup table is surprisingly accurate as it only requires one measurement, they should only be used as a rule of thumb.
Search table for men
| Waist (inches) | Approximate Body Fat Percentage |
| 25 | 5% |
| 26 | 6% |
| 27 | 7% |
| 28 year | eight% |
| 29 | 9% |
| thirty | 10% |
| 31 years | eleven% |
| 32 | thirteen% |
| 33 | 15% |
| 34 | 17% |
| 35 year | nineteen% |
| 36 | 21% |
| 37 | 23% |
| 38 | 26% |
| 39 | 29% |
| 40 | 31% |
| 41 years | 34% |
| 42 | 36% |
| 43 years old | 39% |
| 44 | 42% |
| 45 | 44% |
| 46 | 46% |
| 47 | 48% |
| 48 | 50% |
| 49 | 52% |
| 50 | 54% |
Search table for women
| Waist (inches) | Approximate Body Fat Percentage |
| 25 | 15% |
| 26 | 15% |
| 27 | sixteen% |
| 28 year | 17% |
| 29 | eighteen% |
| thirty | 21% |
| 31 years | 23% |
| 32 | 26% |
| 33 | 28% |
| 34 | 31% |
| 35 year | 34% |
| 36 | 37% |
| 37 | 40% |
| 38 | 43% |
| 39 | 46% |
| 40 | 48% |
| 41 years | 51% |
| 42 | 53% |
| 43 years old | 56% |
| 44 | 58% |
| 45 | 60% |
| 46 | 62% |
| 47 | 63% |
| 48 | 65% |
| 49 | 66% |
| 50 | 67% |
The second method is to record what you eat over the course of several days using your favorite food tracker . The caveat here is that the very process of recording what you eat will change what you do , but try to eat normally. If you have been losing or gaining weight lately, your calorie log may not be the best way to predict your “maintenance” of calories, as you may be over or under calories.
In fact, you can use both methods to make a reasonable guess – just average the two numbers together. If you feel like you’ve done a poor job of imitating your diet in the last few days of enrollment, go closer to the calculator. On the other hand, if you feel like you did a great job and the calculator is off, be wrong about the recorded averages.
Step two: set your target protein and calorie levels
Now for the simplest part. Once you’ve figured out your calories, it’s time to calculate two things: the amount of protein and the amount of calories you’ll be eating. Protein is important because it will allow you to maintain high muscle mass (and therefore your metabolism) when you are in a calorie deficit. It is also a macronutrient that will providemaximum satiety while dieting .
Take the serving calories from the previous step and subtract 20% from them. This will be the number of calories you will focus on each day. For example, if your calorie intake is 2000 calories, you aim to eat about 1600 calories. You don’t have to get 1600 points every day; a margin of error of 5% or so (for example, 1520 to 1680 calories per day in this example).
Next, we will use the method of nutritionist Alan Aragon to determine the desired protein level. Determine your target weight and try to eat that amount in grams. For example, if you weigh 200 pounds now and want to end up weighing 130 pounds, consume 130 grams of protein per day. If you are not used to eating protein, you may not be able to get that amount at first. Do your best and hit as accurately as possible. If you don’t mind supplementation, adding whey or casein protein can help you reach that number.
By the end of this process, you will have all the necessary goals to start your diet. Obviously, this does not automatically mean success. It is important to exercise mindfulness and flexibility while dieting, and develop all the necessary skills to be successful . Having a solid set of calorie and protein goals does wonders for getting you started on the right track, however.