Women Fat Burners

How Much Weight I should Lose - The Formula Explained

If you’re looking to lose weight, there are only two ways for you.  Either you can eat less, or you can increase your activity levels so that your body needs more calories to function.  Ideally you should do both.  That is, decrease your calories a bit, and increase your daily activity.

Naturally that raises the question: how much less do you eat, and how much more activity do you inject into your day?  To answer that, let’s take a look at some basic math.

How much is 1 pound?

A pound of fat is roughly composed of 3500 calories.  That means if you eat 3500 more calories than you need to maintain a steady body weight, you gain a pound of fat.  The flip side is if you eat 3500 fewer calories than your maintenance level, you lose a pound (which hopefully will be fat versus merely water and muscle tissue).

Naturally it would be impossible (and unhealthy) for you to attempt to lose too much too quickly.  So instead what you do is decide how much you can safely lose per week.  For example, if you’re just a little over weight, you can lose about a pound or two a week.  If you’re moderately to grossly overweight, you’ll be able to lose fat much more quickly.

Lose 1 pound a Week:

Let’s suppose you wanted to lose one pound per week. That means you’d need to intake 3500 less calories over the week (and/or increase your activity level).  Over a week, that’s only a mere 500 calories per day (seven days times 500 calories per day equals 3500 calories in a week). 

When you create a 500 calorie deficit each day through fewer calories and more exercise, you lose one pound.  To reach this 500 less calories per day mark, you can take in approximately 250 fewer calories per day, and exercise enough to burn off the other 250 calories.  Simple, right?

How to 2 lose 2 pounds in a week?

Eat 1000 less calories?

That's not viable solution becasue you'll feel hungy and at the end of the day you may overeat!

If you wanted to lose two pounds this week, you’d just double those figures. In that case you’d need to expend about 500 calories through exercise per day, and take in about 500 fewer calories so that you’re at a 1000 calorie per day deficit.  Again, simple.

Calories need for body maintanance:

At this point you may be wondering what exactly your maintenance level is.  That is, how many calories does your body need each day to function?  Obviously this is a useful figure to know, since it’s from this maintenance level that you start subtracting calories through diet and exercise.

There are some fairly complex equations that allow you to get an estimate of your maintenance calories based on your height, weight, body fat percentage, gender, and activity level.  For example, a 25 year old male with an active job (such as construction worker) will need far more calories per day to maintain his body weight as opposed to a 55 year old sedentary woman.

You can see one such calculator here

• For men: http://www.caloriecontrol.org/calcalsm.html
• For women: http://www.healthleader.uthouston.edu/calculators/wm-women.html

The easy way:

A quick and dirty way to figure out your maintenance calories is to estimate that 15 times your body weight in pounds is roughly equal to your maintenance calories, and 10 to 12 times your body weight in pounds is the number of calories you need to lose weight.

For example, if you’re 200 pounds, that means to maintain your weight you need to eat roughly 3000 calories per day (15 X 200 = 3000).  To lose weight, you’d eat between 2000 and 2400 calories per day.

An even better way to discover your daily maintenance calories is to spend a week or two tracking them yourself.  That means that every day you write down exactly what you eat – measure it if necessary to determine true calorie values – and at the end of a week see if you’ve lost, gained, or maintained weight. 

Once you figure out how many calories you need to consistently maintain your current weight, then all you need to do is create your calorie deficit as described above.