Just a FYI to everyone if you are seeking to be calorie aware, and are curious about your personal daily baseline requirements this is a very accurate & simple to use method for determining daily calorie requirements
The following is a web page that has a simple to use daily calorie needs calculator. Unlike some older calorie requirement tables based on Army recruits and college athletes that would wildly overestimate average calories required for ordinary people this one is based on the latest scientific assessments of what people actually burn. Here is a useful calorie calculator applet on this page (link) which provides the most accurate method of calculating daily calorie requirements I have seen to date. If you want the details behind the calculation here is an explanation of the formula . (link)
In calculating the how much you can eat relative to what you want to lose the math is very straightforward. Simply bear in mind a lb of human body fat has approximately 3500 calories. If you want to lose weight at the rate of (say) 2 lbs per week that’s 3,500 x 2 lbs = 7,000 calories you need to drop out of your intake over the course of a week, or about 1,000 calories per day you need to remove from your daily intake. To get a real world gauge on how easy it is to consume 1,000 calories these days that’s almost precisely the number of calories in one Burger King - Double Whopper w/Cheese Sandwich(link).(990 calories).
Interesting. It allows me 2218 but then the same number, 1960, for both fat loss and extreme fat loss. I wonder why extreme fat loss is not a lower number than fat loss.
<< A typical weight loss program aims for fat loss in the region of 1-2 pounds per week (1/2 to 1 kg). The reason for this is to prevent subsequent weight gain due to the body suffering a rapid lowering in metabolism and to prevent loss of muscle.
However, there is a place for faster weight loss in certain circumstances. Fast weight loss is only really appropriate for those who are very overweight. >>
And yet when I put in 5’9", 120 pounds, it recommends 960 calories for extreme fat loss, even though that’s clearly not “very overweight”.
Yeah, it has me at 1660 for extreme fat loss (it pays to be a big guy), and I’ve been doing ~1800 for a while now. SparkPeople has me at a goal of 1980-2330.
I think I track my caloric intake fairly well. Plus, I’m too frugal to buy junk food, so there aren’t any potato chips that I “forget” to log, and I eat out a maximum of once a month, which is so infrequent as to have almost no effect on my average daily intake.
No calculator is perfect but this is much more accurate than the older ones. I’ve been counting calories for over 30 years, and in measuring weight loss against intake and activity levels this one squares up pretty well to reality. Older calculators significantly overestimated the number of calories an average person needs to maintain their weight.
If you’ve got a slower than average metabolism or thyroid (or related) issues your baseline could well be 10% or more off the mark. Also if you’re a long term, serial dieter your body will (as mine has) tend to reset your baseline metabolism lower and lower every time you begin a new diet. Why it does this I don’t know exactly.
I’m really happy to see that the maintenance amount of calories for my goal weight is extremely realistic. 1716- a little higher than an average of my current intake.
Sorry to double post, but the waist-to-hip calculator on that site was fun, too. I may be still about 30 pounds overweight but I still get an “ideal” 0.7. Hooray!
The only problem I have with this is I can’t find their definition for “exercise.” At what duration of activity does one count a day as having exercised? I do exercise every day, but some days it’s only for 15 minutes, and I doubt that’s what they have in mind when they say “every day.”