Losing weight is hard—especially if you don’t know how much you should be eating! I’m asked all the time—How many calories should I eat to lose weight? That’s a hard question for me to answer since it’s different for every person! It’s going to depend on your weight, gender, activity level, etc.
Here is an easy formula that you can use to calculate how many calories you need to eat to lose weight:
Let’s start with you Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR). The BMR is how many calories you burn throughout the day just by sitting around doing NOTHING. This is the BARE MINIMUM number of calories it takes to sustain your body!
The formula to calculate your BMR is the following:
Women: 655 + (4.35 x weight in pounds) + (4.7 x height in inches) – (4.7 x age in years)
Men: 66 + (6.23 x weight in pounds) + (12.7 x height in inches) – (6.8 x age in years)
Let’s add in calorie level so you can see how many calories you should be eating.
Multiply the BMR by:
1.2 if sedentary (little or no exercise)
1.375 if you exercise 1-3 days per week
1.55 if you exercise 3-5 days per week
1.725 if you exercise 6-7 days per week
I’m going to use my weight as an example to show you how this will work:
655 + (4.35 x 175) + (4.7 x 73) – (4.7 x 26)
655 + 761.25 + 343.1 – 122
1,637.35 is my BMR, or the BARE MINIMUM number of calories I should be eating each day.
Let’s take that number and times it by 1.55, since I do exercise daily, and then I’ll add 400 calories since I’m breastfeeding.
Holy smokes—to maintain my weight, I’ll need to eat 2,937 calories a day!
So if I want to lose 1 pound a week, I’ll subtract 500 from that number, so I would eat 2,437.89 calories a day. If I wanted to lose 2 pounds a week, I’ll subtract 1,000 from that number, so I would eat 1,937.89 calories a day.
A lot of times people UNDER EAT when they’re trying to lose weight. They think that 1,200 is a magical number of calories to eat to see that number on the scale move. NOT TRUE!!! What happens when you don’t eat ENOUGH is that your body goes into starvation mode, then it holds onto whatever food you feed it!
Please, EAT! Use this handy calculation to figure out a rough estimate of how many calories you should be consuming each day.
What’s your total? Is it higher than you thought?
So I did the math ontop came to 2115.13. I want to lose 2 lbs a week so I would eat only 1115.13 calories??
NO Kathrin never go below 1200!