How Many Calories Do you Need?

So what is that magical calorie intake number that will allow you to shed pounds?  It may feel elusive but it’s truly not.  For starters when you are trying to figure out how much to eat you have to establish your baseline.  Your baseline can be found by clicking here.  After you plug in your information the calculator will generate how many calories you should be consuming for losing one pound a week, or two pounds a week.

You will want to follow the calorie recommendation for losing two pounds a week.  Now you have your starting point.  You will also need an app like myfitnesspal, or loseit, both allow you to plug in foods you eat and it automatically calculates how much you’ve eaten and how much you have left.

Now here is where a big misconception come in.  In many of these apps it also allows you to plug in your workouts, and tracks not only your workout but how many calories you’ve burned in that workout, then it will add these calories you’ve “earned” in your workout to your total daily allowance.  This is where you don’t listen to your app.

For example.  Let’s say your baseline says to eat 1500 calories day.  By lunch you’ve eaten 750, and then you do an hour long cardio workout where you burn 400 calories.  The app will tell you that instead of 750 calories remaining in your budget, you now have 1150.  But this is incorrect.

The baseline number is what you want to stick to, and ignore the “extra” calories it adds on from your workout.  Those aren’t bonus calories you get to eat, if so what would be the point of all your hard exercise if you just ate it right back.

Hope this simplifies some of the confusion in this area.

If you have any questions feel free to comment below.  If Facebook is your thing, we have a great community where I post a lot of videos on different subjects and there are people in all stages of their fitness journey.  Would love to have you a part of it.

In addition, if you want to know more you might want to check out my book on Amazon.