It should come as no surprise that if you are overweight, it is because you are eating more calories than you need to eat in order to lose weight. Your calorie needs are based on a number of factors including age, sex, activity level, and body size. To get a quick estimate on how many calories you need to eat each day, you can multiply your weight by 15 if you are moderately active, if not multiply it by 13.
How Age Fits into Calories and Weight Loss
If you hadn’t already guessed it, your calorie needs peaked at age 25. Then it steadily began to decline. If your eating didn’t decline with it, then your weight started to climb up.
This means that if at 25 you ate 2,200 calories, then you will need 2,154 by 35. Then at 45, you will only need 2,110. By the time you hit 55, the calories will have dropped to a low of 2,068. The reason is simple. As you age, your body replaces the lean muscle with fat and that does not require as much calories to keep fit.
How Your Sex Affects Calories and Weight Loss
On average adult men have less body fat than an adult woman does. An adult man has about 10 to 20 percent more muscle than a woman, which translates into more calories burned per day. This means roughly five to ten percent more calorie intake than a woman.
The exception is pregnancy and breast-feeding. During these times, a woman should not cut her calories. In fact, a woman may need to increase her calories. It is common to increase calories as much as 300 calories a day during pregnancy and 500 during breast-feeding.
How Metabolism Affects Calories and Weight Loss
Your body will burn a certain number of calories even if you do nothing at all. It requires a certain amount to breathe and run other vital functions. This is called your Basal Metabolic Rate. Most people just refer to this as the metabolism.
Some people have a higher metabolism than others do. It takes very specific machines to tell how your well your metabolism work. However, just know that it does affect your calorie intake.
You can approximate your BMR. Take your current weight and multiply it by 10 for women and 11 for men.
You can’t lose weight if you do not know how many calories you need to eat. Otherwise, you are just spinning your wheels. Calculate your daily calorie intake and go from there. Everyone needs to start here, as all diets and weight loss plans are based on this simple fact. In order to lose weight, you must consume fewer calories than you expend.