THE SIMPLE TRUTH

Everyone knows that if you want to lose weight, you have to expend more energy than you consume: calories in vs calories out, right? So why do most people who consider themselves to be "dieting" fail when it comes to weight loss?

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There are a number of reasons, and I'll be adding more sections to this page to discuss each of those over the next few weeks, so check back for updates often! But for now, I want to cover one of the most basic ways dieters fail: they simply don't know how many calories they should be consuming. So the place to start this article, and the place to start your journey is understanding and (accurately) estimating daily caloric requirements.

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Calories In vs Calories Out

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There are many calculators and tools available to you if you want to accurately calculate your daily caloric requirements, but those tools are only as accurate as the information you provide, and a complicated approach really isn't necessary. So I'll break down the basics so that you can quickly estimate your daily calorie requirements based on your weight-loss goals.

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As a general rule (which is appropriate and sufficient for the general population), your body needs ten calories per day per pound of body weight in order to maintain proper physical functioning: you know, important things like brain function, blood circulation and breathing.

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However, if you do anything on a daily basis that is more physically demanding than laying in an undisturbed, motionless state, your body will require more calories in order to fuel those activities. Keep in mind, all of this is to maintain current body weight, so to effect any kind of weight change, there has to be a caloric imbalance. 

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So first, let's figure out your daily caloric requirement to maintain proper physical functioning without any consideration to weight loss. We'll take my awesome imaginary client, Test Dummy, as an example. Test weighs 145lbs, so all else being equal, she requires about 1,450 calories per day to survive, function and maintain her current weight. 

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But remember what I said about that undisturbed, motionless state? None of us do that - far from it - so we have to account for our daily activities and we have to provide the energy to support those activities. There are a number of factors that we can apply for activity level, as there are for age, gender, etc. but again, this doesn't have to be rocket science. A number you can calculate in your head in a few seconds will get you a lot closer than I'll bet you've been in the past, and using a simple approach with accurate input will be far more reliable than using the most complicated calculators with inaccurate input.

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As a general rule, based on your level of activity, the following factor should be applied to your daily caloric requirements to determine how many calories your body needs to maintain proper physical function, support your daily activities, and maintain your current body weight:

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Sedentary - 1.2

Lightly active - 1.4

Moderately active - 1.6

Very active - 1.7

Superhero - 1.9

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I'll come back to these factors in a second, but the general idea is that you multiply your basic daily caloric requirement by the above factor based on your level of activity. Simple.

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But let's get back to Test Dummy - she certainly doesn't lay in an undisturbed, motionless state all day: she has a family with small children, she works in an office (but she walks to the copier, the break room and colleagues' desks all day long), she walks her dog every night and on weekends, she takes her family shopping, to the zoo, and out for dinner. Test considers herself "pretty active".

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Let's apply the factor for "moderately active" to Test's number - 1,450 x 1.6, which means to maintain her current body weight, she should consume 2,320 calories per day. It sounds like a lot (which it is) and it sounds like a difficult number to reach (which it is not).

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I have a number of issues with this number.

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The first is that all nutrition labeling is based on a daily caloric intake of 2,000, so any calculation for your daily allowance of fats, sugar, sodium, etc., would be based, for my imaginary client, on 2,320. So following this calculation, if her daily requirement is overstated, she will be likely to over-consume macronutrients, micronutrients and pesky little things like salt and sugar.

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My second concern is that this number gives you permission to reach for less healthy choices in order to meet that calorie count. I can tell you it is pretty difficult to reach 2,320 calories consuming healthy, clean, unprocessed food if you are a 145 lb woman. But it's not difficult to reach that number with processed foods or a fast-food diet. So if you find yourself trying to meet a caloric requirement that high, you are more likely to justify an order of fries, or processed meat, or a frozen yoghurt (yoghurt's healthy, right?) because a calorie is a calorie is a calorie, is it not? No, it's not, but that's for another time.

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My last issue with that number is that it is based on an overestimate of "level of activity" and herein is the biggest mistake people make when calculating, estimating or otherwise deriving their daily caloric requirement: none of us are as active as we think we are. 

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Consider the following, industry-accepted definitions of those activity levels:

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Sedentary (little or no exercise)

Lightly active (light exercise/sports 1-2 days per week)

Moderately active (moderate exercise 3-5 days per week)

Very active (hard exercise/sports 6-7 days per week)

Superhero (very hard exercise/sports every day and a physical job)

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You see, we don't get credit for things like walking to the copier, or taking the kids shopping, because those are ordinary capabilities of the human body. You walk all day long (unless you are sedentary) so walking anywhere is not considered for extra credit. So when Test Dummy applied the factor of 1.6 to her calorie requirement, she actually overestimated her daily caloric need by almost 300 calories. That may seem pretty insignificant, but it takes the caloric requirements of an average working woman down to 2,030, which is a lot closer to the baseline 2,000 calories used to determine her daily dietary allowances for everything else. And I'll explain in a moment why a 300 calorie difference really is significant.

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So when you apply this activity factor to your own number, be honest with yourself about your true activity level. If you have to try to justify to yourself that something you do should be considered exercise, it probably isn't. You're not doing yourself any favors by giving yourself extra credit for the stuff that doesn't count. 

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Finally, let's talk about calorie deficits and weight loss. If you want to lose weight, you simply must consume fewer calories than you expend, on a consistent basis. Again, a general rule, that can be applied to the general population is that a calorie deficit of 500 per day will give rise to weight loss at the rate of one pound per week.

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Now this doesn't mean that you can set yourself at a caloric deficit of 2,000 and lose 4lbs per week, but I'll cover setting safe and effective weight-loss goals another time. What it does mean is that if my client wants to lose ten pounds, I would advise a daily caloric intake of 1,530 (her base 2,030 minus the necessary deficit of 500) with her current level of activity maintained, and I would expect to see her lose those ten pounds in a very comfortable ten weeks.

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Now do you see just how significant that extra 300 calories would be? Thinking that she is hitting the right number of calories at 2,320 and deducting the 500 calories to reach her deficit, Test Dummy would actually only have a calorie deficit of 200, not 500, and her weight loss would likely stall.

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Use the guidelines above to calculate your own daily caloric requirements, based on your daily activity and your weight-loss goals. Once you reach that number (and I think it will surprise you), think about how close you are to that.

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Over the coming weeks, I'll cover a number of related topics. If you'd like me to cover anything in particular, have questions about this article, or would like to talk about how I can help you reach your goals, just click on the contact button on my Home page, email me at the address at the top of this page, or reach me on Facebook.