It's generally known that in order to lose weight and maintain an ideal body weight, you need to reduce your calorie intake. However, you should cut down the amount of calorie consumption properly. Very low calorie intake diet will cause you to lose too much protein and carbohydrate instead of fat stores, which is not something you want.
What is calorie?
Calorie is a unit of energy that your body produces upon the process of metabolism break down of the food you eat. The energy allows you to do what you need and want to do.
How many calories per day to lose weight?
The first step in losing weight by counting calories is to figure out the total amount of calories you burn in a day, including all activities. You will need to find out your daily calorie needs which are the amount of energy your body requires to maintain normal functions. This will become the reference number of calories needed to lose weight and from which to begin your dieting.
To maintain normal functions, men usually will need about 2100 to 2700 calories while women require 1800 to 2100 calories daily. However, these numbers are based on averages thus the daily calorie needs often are completely different from person to person. It depends on many other factors such as gender, age, physical activity levels, height and current weight.
Man usually requires larger amount of calories than woman. Children and older people often will need lesser calories than adults. While a person who do physically demanding work will need more calories intake than sedentary one. And last, if you weight more then you'll need more calories to support your weight.
Calculate your daily calorie needs
You can use calorie calculator that you can find easily on the net to calculate your daily calorie needs. A quick and easy way to count how many calories needed per day to lose weight or maintain weight is to calculate a calorie value with a multiplier as provide below.
Lose weight = 12 x [body weight in pounds].
Maintain weight = 15 x [body weight in pounds].
This will give you a rough estimation of how many calories to take daily for losing weight although it doesn't consider your particular activity levels, metabolism levels or body fat levels. The maintenance number that you get is the amount of calories that you need to eat daily to keep your current weight.
You will now have a rough number of the calories needed to lose weight.
Now, how many calories need to be reduced?
As a general rule of thumb in losing weight by counting calories, the amount of calories you intake must be lesser than the calories you burn.
So, if you want to lose one pound of weight per week, you can reduce your calorie intake by 500 calories daily. You can also reduce calorie consumption by 15% to 20% of your daily calorie requirements and increase the reduction amount gradually. Other alternative is to reduce your calorie intake by 15% of current calorie intake.
Diets for weight loss
You're allowed to follow a diet as low as 1200 calories per day for women and 1800 calories per day for men. But it's safer to stay above 1500 calories intake per day.
You can manage your daily calories intake by taking note of what you eat and drink daily for seven days. At the end of each days eating, add up the total amount of calories consumed. Then at the end of the seven days, add the total calories for those seven days and divide it by seven, this is your daily calorie intake. You now will have more control over how many calories you should include in your daily diet.
A more simple method to control your calories intake is to watch your fat intake since fat has the most calories.
Losing weight by counting calories means that you can eat all kind of foods as long as your calories intake doesn't go over your daily calories needed. The ideal type of foods is the one that fill you up and don't fill you out, foods that are low in fat and sugar which aren't refined. Spread your meals out over many small meals a day instead of the traditional three meals a day. You should also include a little protein in each meals to maintain your muscle mass and energy levels. And remember, never use laxatives to interfere the absorption of calories in your body.
The following foods are low-calorie choices that will benefit your diets for weight loss efforts:
- Green Tea
- Broth- or tomato-based soup
- Low-calorie green salads
- Yogurt
- Beans
- Water
- High-Fiber, Whole-Grain Cereal