Thursday, January 14, 2010

A Question

If you're calorie counting, how do you determine the right amount of calories you should be consuming? I know you can sabotage your efforts if you go too low -- your body thinks it's starving, so it hoards fat. Any ideas?

5 comments:

  1. That's a good question! I hope someone can up with an answer cuz' i sure don't have one. :) i thought you had to eat 1500 calories, i know i haven't been i'm not specifically counting calories but i've been watching them and being careful how many i consume. i think it might be tedious to write it all down, but it may come to that.

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  2. Here is a website that will calculate it for you! http://walking.about.com/cs/calories/l/blcalcalc.htm
    Hope this helps!

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  3. In order to lose one pound, (not just water, but fat) you need to eliminate 3500 calories from your diet.
    According to what I read, you need to have 15 calories per pound you weigh to maintain.
    So for example, if you want to weight 135, you would multiply that by 15 to equal 2025 calories per day for maintenance.
    In order to lose 1 to 2 pounds per week (the recommended amount so you don't gain it all back as soon as you are done), you would need to eliminate 3500 to 7000 calorie per week. So...
    do the math.
    Weight Watchers for women before points used to be 1200 to 1400 calories per day. Pregnant and nursing... 2000 to 2400 per day. Men 1500 to 1800 per day.
    Hope that helps!
    Lynda

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  4. Thanks for all your good information! Lynda, the 15 calories per pound is much more generous than the calculator Lauri provided. According to it, I need to eat only 1764 calories to maintain my current weight (considerably more than 135)! That was discouraging, and I almost gave up. But, I think I could do 1400 for a few months if I knew I could maintain 2000+ for the rest of my life.

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  5. One caveat for all of this. The 15 calories a day is for average activity. If you can't be active, you will want to watch the caloric intake to see what your personal body requires. But in general, the maintenance figures seem to be valid. Once you get to your desired weight, the easiest way to go to figure this out, is to add 100 calories a day for a week, then see what that has done to your numbers. And continue with 100 calories a day added each week until you maintain or go up a little. If you're maintaining, you know what number to aim for. If you're up a little, back off the 100 calories for a couple of weeks, and see what happens. If you're losing add in 50 calories a day and see what happens, and so on until you figure out your personal maintenance calories.

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