How Many Calories do You Need Each Day

The Road to Healthy Weight Loss

There's really no way to get around this very simple fact. If you want to lose weight, you'll need to look at the balance between calories you burn and the calories you consume. That's the healthy formula for losing weight and it's the most sensible for reasons that I'll detail below. Sure, you can lose weight quickly using just about any of the fad diets that are so popular at any given time and if you really need to shed a few extra pounds for a big event then by all means go for it but if you're looking for a more permanent solution then some lifestyle changes are called for.

You can't start a healthy weight loss program without first knowing how many calories you require each day. Just about all food labels list nutrients based on a 2,000 calorie per day consumption. The assumption of course is that 2,000 calories per day is the average for most people but individual calorie requirements depend on three factors: your at basal metabolism rate, your activity level and how your body processes the food you eat.

The basal metabolism rate refers to the energy (calories) the body uses for life maintaining activities, like making sure we're breathing, our heart is pumping, our body temperature is where it should be, etc. Between 60% and 70% of the calories we consume each day are used to keep us in good running order. That's a whopping amount for a body at rest! It's also a good reason for staying away from diets that require huge reductions in the number of calories consumed each day. Cutting off fuel that the body needs to keep us healthy is just asking for trouble.

The next area that affects the number of daily calories needed is our activity level. This accounts for approximately another 20% to 30% of our calorie requirements. Most of us know how our activity or lack thereof affects our weight. The more active we are the more calories we need and conversely the less active we are the fewer calories we need. That's fairly straightforward. What might not be so obvious is how to categorize our activity level. When computing daily calorie requirements, we're usually given three options for activity level: Sedentary, Moderately Active and Very Active, but which one to use? Sedentary is fairly easy to figure out. We don't do much moving around in that category but for the other two categories it's not so easy and there's not a great deal of help on the Internet either. However, I did find this Activity Calculator that will give you the number of calories burned for a large variety of activities. You only have to input your weight and the time you spend on your movements and you'll see a listing of calories burned for a wide range of activities. You can then get a rough idea of your activity level for your particular lifestyle.

The final area that affects calorie requirements is what is needed for digesting and processing the food we eat. That process uses around 10% of the calories we consume.

Now I could put all this together and leave you with a very complicated formula for computing your daily calorie requirements but that would be a real turn off and who wants to spend 15 minutes just doing the math. Instead, I'll borrow a formula that I found to be very simple and can be done in seconds.
For a sedentary lifestyle: Weight x 14 = estimated cal/day
For a moderately active lifestyle: Weight x 17 = estimated cal/day
For an active lifestyle: Weight x 20 = estimated cal/day


Good eating is essential to good health. Small victories will show you how. Visit healthy eating to learn more.