How to calculate calories for weight loss
I hear this question asked all…the…time! The short answer is… It depends.
Now here’s the long answer. There are plenty of calorie and macronutrient calculators online that are based on height, weight, gender, age, etc. You’re more than welcome to start there. It makes it quick and easy to get an answer, BUT (Yes, there’s always a big but!) this may not be the best place for you to start. Depending on how much weight you would like to lose, you may be at this for awhile. The last thing you want to do is drop into so big of a deficit that you plateau and have nowhere to go.
What do I mean by that? Our bodies are quite good at adapting to our circumstances. If you were to start running ten miles a day, you would lose weight at first, but eventually your body would get used to that much running and you would stop seeing weight lost results. The same is true with our calorie intake. If all of a sudden, you started eating 1,000 calories a day, you would likely see a good amount of weight loss, but eventually your body would say, “Hey, I’m only getting 1,000 calories a day, I better slow down my metabolism since my energy intake is so limited.” This is why calorie calculators are not my preferred way to answer this question. You need to figure out how many calories you normally consume.
Now, this is where I lose people. The best way to figure out your calories is to start tracking all of your food (and drinks!!) for at least two weeks. Don’t change your eating habits. Eat exactly as you have been to get to the point where you are now. You can download a free food tracking app on your phone, such as My Fitness Pal or My Net Diary. Weigh yourself first thing in the morning on Day 1 of the two weeks and again first thing in the morning on Day 15. Now you have some information you can use to get a more accurate starting place. How many calories did you consume on average each day? How much of each macronutrient did you consume? Did your weight go up, stay the same or go down?
You probably didn’t drop any pounds if your goal is to lose weight. If you did, you likely changed your eating habits because you started tracking your food and became more aware of what you were consuming. If you lost more than two pounds each week, you need to up your calories a bit. If it was one to two pounds per week, perfect! Keep eating in that calorie range. But what if you didn’t lose weight?
If your weight stayed the same or went up, we need to begin by slowly lowering calories. The key word here is “slowly”. Start by lowering your calories by about 100 calories a day. Prioritize getting in your protein, since most people are already lacking in that. Continue to track your food and drinks to make sure you’re staying within your calories. After one week, reevaluate. Did you lose, maintain or gain? If you lost one to two pounds, stay there. If you maintained or gained, drop another 100 calories a day the next week. Then reevaluate again.
Once you are losing one to two pounds per week, stay at that calorie count for a few weeks. Eventually, your body will adapt to this new, lower calorie intake, so you’ll need to adjust again. Every month, you may need to drop another 100 calories a day to continue to lose. I highly recommend throwing in a week of maintenance calories every six to eight weeks to make sure that you’re able to maintain the weight that you’ve lost.
There is another scenario that I’d like to mention. In those first two weeks of tracking your calories, if you maintained or gained weight, but were consuming 1,500 or fewer calories, we need to work a different strategy. This is something that no one wanting to lose weight wants to hear. You need to very slowly increase your calorie intake. This is called reverse dieting. It is a way to get yourself to a healthy place so you can safely lose weight without compromising your health. If you were to start cutting calories at such low an intake, you would quickly see your allotted calories drop to a place that would make it hard to not only continue and sustain weight loss, but also make it difficult to get all of your macro and micronutrients. You do NOT want to be in that place.
You want your weight loss to be slow, but continuous and most importantly, SUSTAINABLE! Dropping too much weight too fast usually results in the pounds coming back on. Cutting calories drastically typically results in a plateau that requires cutting even more into unhealthy territory and in many people binging once the weight is off and, you guessed it! The pounds coming back on. The old saying is true. Slow and steady wins the race! If you have questions about this, feel free to reach out to me by email or on social media.
