Saturday, October 5, 2019

Eight Great Weight Loss Tips : Weight loss tip #6: Determine how many calories you need to maintain your current weight

Eight Great Weight Loss Tips : Weight loss tip #6: Determine how many calories you need to maintain your current weight
↪ Weight loss tip #5: Reduce stress.
Weight loss tip #6: Determine how many calories you need to maintain your current weight, and how many you need to reduce per day to meet your weight loss goals. Step 1: Determine your basal metabolic rate. This is how many calories your body burns just to maintain minimal life-support functions and is about 75% of all the calories you burn. The formula is simply your body weight ____ X 10= basal metabolic rate.

Now, to determine how many calories you need each day to maintain your current weight, multiply the base metabolic rate by a "lifestyle factor" based on how active you are. A note on the formula: it is just a rough estimate, females will need a few less calories (perhaps 200) than this formula indicates. Males might need 100 more. As you age, you will require fewer calories as well to maintain weight. So, use the formula to get you started, then adjust your daily caloric needs based on your results (this is where a nutrition log is important, see weight loss tip #7).


For sedentary people (office workers, people who mostly sit or drive all day) use 1.4. For moderately active people (people on their feet all day like wait staff, service industry, moderate exercise) use 1.6. For very active people (jobs with lots of physical labor, movers etc., athletes) use 1.8. If you think you are in between two of the examples, then you can split the difference.

Let's plug some numbers in: Weight 195 pounds, office worker. 195X10 = 1950 calorie basal metabolic rate. 1950 X 1.4 = 2730. This is roughly how many calories they need to consume to stay at 195 pounds. It's not an exact science, but should be very close and is a great starting point.

Now you can set your weight loss goals based on how many pounds you want to lose and in what time-frame. The maximum sustainable healthy weight loss level is about 2 pounds per week. In order to lose 2 pounds per week, you need to decrease your energy intake, and/or increase your energy output, by 1000 calories per day. A 500 calorie per day reduction will result in a loss of approximately one pound per week.

So, losing 40 pounds will take 20 weeks, or about 5 months at 2lbs per week. If you decrease your daily intake by 500 calories per day as well as increase your energy expenditure by an average of 500 calories per day. From our example above, to lose 2 lbs per week, they would either need to eat 1730 calories per day (2730-1000) or 2230 calories with about 500 calories worth of exercise averaged out over each day.
↪ Weight loss tip #7: Keep a food log.


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