How Many CALORIES Should I Eat to LOSE WEIGHT

Check out my client Alex’s transformation where he put on a whole bunch of muscle

There are a lot of different ways to calculate how many calories you should be eating per day to lose weight.

And in today’s video, I’m gonna go over all the different ways,

but you have to keep in mind that these calculations will only give us a baseline to start with.

You’re going to have to do some trial and error, see how your body responds, and then make modifications.

So with that said let start with the easiest one of these methods. This method is easy, but probably not quite as accurate as a calorie calculator.

Although I have used this method as a simple baseline for clients before and it worked very well.

All you have to do is take your current weight if your a man multiply that weight times 11 and if you’re a woman multiply that weight times 10.

Every 5 lbs of weight you lose you can redo this easy calculation and get your new estimated calories for weight loss.

As you can see this method doesn’t take into account your height, your age, or your activity level.

So it can only be used as a baseline and it will never be exact. Regardless I’ve still experienced success using this method,

and it always winds up being not too far off from the estimates you will get from using complex formulas.

This formula is best for sedentary individuals. Or sedentary individuals just starting exercise.

Another way to calculate your calories is to find your maintenance calories and then subtract 20% of calories from there.

You may be wondering why we’re choosing to take away 20% instead of 30 or 40% and that’s because 20% has been found to be the ideal ratio for losing body fat without losing too much muscle.

The easiest way to calculate your maintenance calories is to multiply your weight by 14-17.

This helps take your activity level into account. Multiply by 14 if you’re not active and by 17 if you’re very active.

And you can multiply by 15 or 16 if you’re somewhat in between. So I weigh 210lbs and I’m pretty active so I’ll multiply by 16.

This gives me 3,360 calories. Once I multiply by 20% that leaves me with a 672 calorie deficit. 3,360-672 = 2,688 calories.

So with this method, I am allowed to eat more than 350 extra calories per day for my high activity level.

For the final and supposedly most accurate way to calculate your required daily calories for weight loss is to use a calorie calculator.

These calculators will usually use either the Mifflin-St Jeor equation or the Harris-Benedict formula to calculate your maintenance calories and then subtract roughly 500 calories to give you your weight loss calories.

I’m going to include a link in the description for you to be able to access a calorie calculator that will give you your maintenance calories and your fat loss calories.

When I do my calorie calculations I end up with 2632 calories per day. This turns out to be very close to the total that I got from multiplying my weight by 16.

I want to remind you guys one more time that regardless of which method you used this number is only a baseline.

If you start with lets 2,000 calories but notice that you aren’t losing any weight after a week,

drop by 300 calories and see what you get from 1700 calories over the next week. You have to reevaluate and readjust every now and then to stay on track.