How Many Calories Should I Eat A Day?

A quick look at what it takes to lose weight by counting calories, including various tips.

Log your calories

One of the most valuable weapons in your weight-loss arsenal is a food diary that records all of the food and drink you consume each day. This diary, log, or journal allows you to keep tabs on your current caloric intake and allows you the option to adjust your eating habits to greater effect. Keeping track of how many calories you consume is only beneficial if you are completely honest with yourself, because sweets and fancy drinks can take up a large portion of your daily allotted amount. It is a good idea to talk to your doctor if you are considering any forms of weight loss, because they will often be able to offer you valuable advice for your journey.

Anybody counting calories on a daily basis is concerned with one thing: not exceeding a certain amount. Before you can calculate this daily amount, you should accurately weigh yourself and write down the result. The higher quality the scale, the more precise the computation will be.

Recommended caloric intake

Generally, health authorities advocate that an average caloric intake should be equal to 15 times your weight, per day. For example, a 180 pound male would require 2,700 calories, while a 135 pound female would require 2025 calories every day. This is the equilibrium number, and eating this amount is considered a plateau in terms of losing or gaining weight. Maintaining your recommended caloric intake will not allow you to lose any weight in a traditional nutritional sense. It is worth noting that the recommended calorie intake figure also depends heavily on the height of the person, so you should really consider referencing literature.

Formula for losing weight

If you want to actually lose weight, you will have to subtract a number from the recommended caloric intake, to lower the number of calories consumed per day. This subtraction of calories is what allows your body to draw on the stored calories in fat reserves, such as stomach fat, and lets you lose weight at a gradual and constant pace.

Tips on losing weight

Examine any and all nutrition fact labels you can. Every packaged food is required by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to display all of their ingredients and nutritional facts, so take advantage of this! You can learn a lot about what you eat by reading a little bit. Try to pay better attention to the serving sizes on nutrition labels. Calories listed on the labels are based off of the serving size, so if you ignore it you are going to get an inaccurate calorie count.

Ask your physician for help. Everybody’s body is unique, and your doctor will know your health situation better than anybody else. He or she will determine your body mass index and suggest caloric intake based on various measurements.

When eating at restaurants, try to obtain data about what you are eating via the internet or even by asking the staff. Write this information down and analyze it, because eating out is by no means a free pass to eat an unrecorded amount of calories.