How Many Calories To Lose Weight?

This article is dedicated to teaching you how many calories you need to burn in order to lose weight. With simple math and easy goals, you will lose weight in no time!

What's in a pound? When you're trying to lose weight, it can be truly daunting trying to figure out what will help you achieve your goals and what won't. There are countless ads and articles extolling the virtues of strange drinks and tricky meal planning that is supposed to make you lose inhuman amounts of body fat in short periods of time. The long and short of weight loss boils down to calories. Exercise is an important part of a healthy lifestyle, but the simple fact is you cannot outrun a bad diet. For this discussion we will break down the calories involved in weight loss, and an overview of basic diet planning.

How to lose one pound?


Science shows us that a pound of fat is about 3,500 calories. In other words, eating an extra 3,500 calories will cause you to gain roughly a pound of bodyfat, and similarly if you cut 3,500 calories from your diet you will lose roughly a pound of fat. These are big numbers, but the concept is simple.

Consider your diet right now. You might be eating 2,600 calories a day if you are a six foot tall male who weighs around 230 pounds. You're not morbidly obese, but you'd rather be down around 180 pounds strutting your stuff on the beach with confidence, right? Some simple math will show that you want to lose 50 pounds of fat. Holy smokes! 50 pounds of fat loss means cutting a whopping 175,000 calories! Relax, it's much easier than it sounds.

What should you do?

Now that we've figured out how many calories to lose the weight, we figure out when. You can lose one to two pounds of fat per week if you are determined and exercise a bit of self control. Remember we said your diet was about 2600 calories per day? Now we work backwards to see what your new diet will be. To lose a single pound every week, you would need to cut 3,500 calories from your total food consumption. Bust out that calculator! On a normal week you would have eaten 18,200 calories. Subtract 3,500 (for the pound you will lose), and divide the answer by 7 to get your new daily calorie budget. So in this case by eating 2,100 calories a day you will be shedding a solid pound of fat every week! Not so bad now is it?

How to cut calories?

To put it in perspective: eating 500 calories less could be accomplished as easily as eliminating that late night bowl of ice cream, having broccoli instead of extra cheesy pizza, or by switching to an unsweetened iced tea instead of your morning doughnuts. It's all about making simple changes that are easy on their own, but add up to big losses over time. This is the key to effective and long-lasting weight loss. Make lifestyle changes that eliminate high calorie foods that are not filling or nutritious. By eating more healthy and whole foods, you will never go hungry, and will have no trouble meeting your weight loss goals.

Now you might be curious, could you just eat almost nothing and lose a ton of weight in a jiffy? The answer is no. The body uses a certain amount of energy for basic functions like running your brain and keeping your body warm, this is called your resting metabolic rate (also known as a basal metabolic rate). If you eat less than the amount needed for your body to keep itself running, bad things can and will happen. Most people agree that losing more than two pounds per week is neither healthy nor sustainable. You should aim to lose the weight slow and steady by making healthy eating choices that result in a net caloric deficit. For more reading you can look up the Harris-Benedict equation which is used to estimate your particular basal metabolic rate. Remember that this is the bare minimum, not what you should actually be eating.

For more in depth calculating, there are great websites which ask you for some information about your body and lifestyle and can tell you the approximate dietary needs for your goals. There are even websites which allow you to track foods eaten and help you achieve your goals through science rather than blind guessing. A simple Google search should turn up several which you can select from.

Exercise to burn more calories!

The number one method of burning calories is weight lifting. By adding more muscles to your body, you will reach your weight loss goals faster than ever.

Why?

Here's a fact. Muscles can help you burn calories EVEN when you are sitting around doing nothing! And this is what makes weight lifting the number one exercise for weight loss.

Some of you might not be interested in lifting weights. Just pick several exercises you love doing and be persistent with them. Remember, the more and faster you move, the more calories you will burn.

Is exercising necessary for weight loss?

The answer is NO. If you follow a GOOD diet, you will lose weight without going to the gym and work out. The other day, I watched a video about a nutrition professor who lost around 30 pounds with diet only.

But, what makes him special is that the diet that helped him lose 30 pounds is a diet with mostly snacks, such as Twinkies, soda, and chips.

His secret was that he ate everything moderately and he counted his calories. And that made a huge difference. Therefore, counting calories is essential and in fact, it is more important than anything else when it comes to losing weight. 

Conclusion

Remember that while it might seem pedantic to tabulate each and every thing you eat, it gets easy. What you soon realize is that rather than constantly feeling guilty about what you ate for lunch, you can now just budget out the day's calories. Taking the guesswork out is surprisingly limiting, and you will probably be surprised by how much good food you can eat when you start cutting out the calorie-rich junk and eating the foods that both you and your body can enjoy.

Hopefully you now feel empowered. Remember that when you do the math and break it down into small easy goals, weight loss can be almost effortless. No longer do you have to wonder how many calories to lose weight, you can just punch it into the calculator!