Easy Ways to Calculate your Daily Calories

Let’s face it, no matter how you feel about food, whether you love it or hate it, we all need it as we all need energy to function on a day to day basis. No matter how much you weigh, and no matter whether or not you’re trying to lose body fat, you still need to consume adequate amounts of calories in order to function at optimal health. The problem that many people seem to have, is that they don’t know exactly how many calories they’re consuming on a daily basis, and they don’t know exactly how many calories they should be consuming either. They see general guidelines for adults and work off that, which is great in theory. The problem there is that these guidelines have no idea how tall a person is, how much that person actually weighs, what that person’s goals and targets might be, and how much of that person’s weight is made up of body fat, and how much is made from muscle. For example, a 6 foot 5 bodybuilder who weighs close to 300lbs of solid muscle will require a heck of a lot more calories than a 5 foot 6 man who weighs 170 lbs. There are however, easy ways to calculate your daily calories, many of which are actually pretty straightforward.

Online calorie counters – The internet certainly does have more uses than people realize and online calorie counters are proof of that sentiment. The great thing about many of these counters is the fact that you can enter your weight, your height, your age, and your gender, but on top of all that, many of them also let you enter info such as how active you are, how much you weigh currently, and what your targets are. If you’re looking to build lean muscle for instance, you will require more calories than if you were trying to simply lose body fat. Some of these trackers can even roughly calculate your BMI so you will be able to get a rough idea of how much of your weight is made up of fat, and how much of muscle.

Consider basic guidelines for Fat Loss – These are only guidelines and should not be taken as gospel but generally speaking many of these guidelines are pretty effective and can help make things much clearer for people who don’t happen to have PHD’s in sport’s and exercise science. The general rule of thumb is that 1 pound of body fat is equal to around 3,500 calories. This means that if you were to reduce your calories by 500 per day, you would lose around 1 pound of fat per week.

Always remember to factor in physical activity – Many apps and activity and calorie trackers now allow us to track our calories meal by meal, giving us a daily target based upon our goals, and also factoring in exercise. Say you spend one hour on the treadmill for instance, and burn off 500 calories. These calories will now be deducted from your daily goal and target, so you’ve essentially earned yourself 500 calories. Remember not to drop your calories too slow either, as this can slow the metabolism making it harder to burn body fat.