Daily Calorie Needs

Now that you are familiar with the three macronutrients that compose our diet, how do you take that information and use it to make sure you are eating appropriate amounts of each in order to achieve your goals? We will get into that today and dive into how much of each you should be consuming for different scenarios.

The first thing you will need to know, after your goal of course, is how many total Calories you will need to be consuming every day. In order to figure that out, you will have to know how many Calories you actually use every day. We know that Calories in vs. Calories out controls our overall weight, so we need to know how many Calories we're burning in order to know what our target should be for Caloric intake.

There are many ways to do this and some of the more accurate methods can require special help from doctors or expensive technologies or procedures. However, there are a few other ways that are at least accurate enough to be effective and useful for us to reach our goals. Many methods rely on knowing things like your body fat percentage, but here is a formula that I like that pretty much everyone can do.

All you need is few pieces of information that you probably already know or can find out pretty quickly. You'll need to know your height, weight and age and then your best estimate of your activity level on a 5-point scale. For our purposes here, we'll use Imperial measurments (pounds and inches for weight and height respectively).

Now, here are the formulas...

For guys: (body weight x 6.25)+(height x 12.7)-(age x 6.76)

For ladies:

(body weight x 4.35) + (height x 4.7) - (age x 4.68)

Now, on a scale of 1-5 with 1 being sedentary and 5 being extremely active, rate your activity level. Got it? Now, take the number you got from the above equation and multiply it by the number shown based on your activity level.

1 - Sedentary - 1.1 2 - Lightly Active - 1.2 3 - Moderately Active - 1.35 4 - Very Active - 1.5 5 - Extremely Active - 1.65

Let's run through an example...

For a 35 year old man who weighs 215lbs and is 73" tall and is somewhat lightly active, it would look like this: (215 x 6.25) + (73 x 12.7)-(35 x 6.76)=2036.4 2036.4 x 1.2 = 2443.68

So, this guy would need about 2450 Calories a day to maintain his weight. If he wanted to lose weight, he would target less than that amount on average and vice-versa if he wanted to gain weight.

Next time, we'll get a bit more into how to take this number and use it for reaching our goals. Don't stay away too long!