Calculating your daily calorie needs

There are 1000 diets out there and every single one of them boils down to one simple fact: To lose weight, you must consume fewer calories than you burn.  It's the one and only true answer.  What differs between diets is how you accomplish that.  The man behind the curtain in all of it is determining how many calories you burn.  There's no perfectly accurate way to do this... at least not any reasonable way.  But we do have some research and formulas available to us.  But before we get there, allow me to state the obvious.

You eat X calories right now.  You burn Y calories just sitting on your kiester.  You burn an additional Z calories by doing stuff.

I know you can calculate X.  Avoid estimating because you suck at it.  Calculate.  That means measuring portion sizes, reading labels, and summing/dividing recipes.  If you can't count it, don't eat it.  And most importantly, you have to log everything immediately.  It's easy to forget that butter you put on your bread or the cheese on your sandwich or the cookie you "shared" with your kid.  That's gotta stop.  Wake up and write out your plan for the day.  Budget yourself so you don't wind up eating 90% of your daily calories by 2pm (or 10% for that matter).  I use LoseIt.  It's free.  It's easy.  It's also got an untrustworthy food database.  Double check everything against labels, and if you're cooking with things that don't have labels, check it against CalorieKing.

Ok, so now you can count, but what are you counting up to?  LoseIt will figure this out for you, but if you want to fine-tune it, you'll need to do some math.  First determine what you burn in a day, completely at rest.  This is called your Basal Metabolic Rate, or BMR.  The formula will vary based on your age, gender, and typical daily activity.  Just google up a BMR calculator.  If you decide to go nuts with a spreadsheet (like me), google what the formula is and get calculating.

Ignore the Z calories for moment.  You've got your Y number, right?  Subtract 1000 from that number.  That's your calorie budget if you want to lose 2 pounds a week.  Not very many calories left, right?  That's where Z comes in.  You have to exercise.  If you don't, you're going to go around pissing and moaning about how you're always hungry.  Get to the gym and burn 300-500 calories.  Again, google and LoseIt are your friends here.  You can estimate the number of calories you burned during any given activity.

When I started a month ago, my rule was to ignore the exercise calories and just stick to staying 1000 calories under the BMR limit.  That didn't work so well.  I'd wake up and be ravenously hungry.  Last week I tried eating my exercise calories.  Today's weigh-in shows that I may be taking too large of an exercise calorie credit, but I'll need more data to feel confident in my conclusions.  This is why I keep a strict log.  If I'm not losing weight, I could be burning less than the calculators are telling me.  Knowing all the numbers will allow me to make small adjustments as my progress stalls or accelerates too quickly.

or, it could just be the cheesecake I ate.

So there you have it.  Eat less.  Exercise more.  Count everything.  It's not pretty.  It's not simple.  It's not a gimmick.  But it's the one thing every "diet" has in common.  Do it your own way, or join the latest diet cult if you like.  Either way, you can't escape the physics.