Posts Tagged ‘healthy eating diets’

How Many Calories Should I Eat to Lose Weight?

How Many Calories Should I Eat to Lose Weight? Is that a burning question in your mind now? Don’t worry; you will have the answer here. Knowing how many calories you should eat to lose weight is indeed very important, so that you can maintain your ideal body mass for improved health.

First, you need to understand Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) term. BMR is basically the term used to determine how many calories you need to eat in order to keep your body functioning while you are inactive. It can also be explained that Basal Metabolic Rate is the number of calories you’d burn if you stayed in bed all day.

How to calculate BMR?

You can calculate your BMR using various online BMR calculators available, or you can also use BMR calculator from health.discovery.com.

Once you have got your BMR quantity, you can calculate your daily calorie needs based on your activity level using the Harris Benedict Formula.

• If you are sedentary (almost no exercise):

Calorie Calculation = BMR x 1.2

• If you are lightly active (light exercise/sports 1-3 days/week):

Calorie Calculation = BMR x 1.375

• If you are moderately active (moderate exercise/sports 3-5 days/week):

Calorie Calculation = BMR x 1.55

• If you are very active (hard exercise/sports 6-7 days a week):

Calorie Calculation = BMR x 1.725

• If you are highly active (excessive exercise/sports & physical work or 2x training):

Calorie Calculation = BMR x 1.9

Now you can see that the calculation is not that complicated. So, if you are willing to achieve your ideal weight, you need to adjust your required calories intake. More importantly, it is very important to make gradual adjustments to your diet over a period of time. A too sudden and extreme change can cause your body to go into starvation mode thus defeating your objective altogether.

However, you also need to know that how many calories you should eat depends on what you eat. If you get all the calories from vegetables, fruits and other healthy foods, then you can eat more calories. Many people still can eat 3500 calories from the healthy food and still can lose their weight. That is because their body never experienced a nutrition rich state. But if you only consume fast food all day, then there is no other choice than having to drop your calorie intake.