Luckily though, there are a few quick and easy ways to get an accurate estimate of what
your daily calorie maintenance level is.
Whether you used method # 1, method # 2, or a combination of both (or did the experiment described in method # 3), you should now have a really good idea of what
your daily calorie maintenance level is.
That means 2500 calories is
your daily calorie maintenance level in this example.
Somewhere in between those 2 amounts will usually be
your daily calorie maintenance level.
But for right now, all that matters is that you have your estimated
daily calorie maintenance level figured out.
While method # 1 is usually pretty accurate for most people, it still has the potential to be off to some degree because it doesn't account for many of those individual factors I mentioned before (like age, gender and activity level), all of which affect what
our daily calorie maintenance level is.
This is referred to as the Thermic Effect Of Food, and it's one of those factors I mentioned earlier that influence what
your daily calorie maintenance level is.
Even though I just showed you some of the most popular methods of estimating
your daily calorie maintenance level, there is one tiny problem.
In the previous step, I showed you a couple of ways to calculate
your daily calorie maintenance level.
Your daily calorie maintenance level is way higher than that of the different body types.
In the following example, we will pretend our example person is a man who weighs 165 lbs and has
a daily calorie maintenance level of 2100 (which are just completely made up numbers, by the way).
The answer given is the total of the two and should be, for most people, a pretty close estimate of
your daily calorie maintenance level.
Let's say some person (male or female) had
a daily calorie maintenance level of 2500 calories.
Our example person estimated that they have
a daily calorie maintenance level of 2100 calories.
Now that you have a good estimate of
your daily calorie maintenance level, it's time for the fun part.
For the sake of using an easy to understand example, PersonX will weigh 200 pounds and have
a daily calorie maintenance level of 2500 calories.
As I mentioned before,
your daily calorie maintenance level is the number of calories that your body burns per day.
Not exact matches
Increase the total
daily caloric intake back to your current estimated caloric bodyweight
maintenance level, or the number of
calories you need to maintain your present body weight.
e.g. a 30 - year - old female measuring 167 cm tall and weighing 54.5 kg would compute 655 + 523 + 302 — 141 to get a
maintenance level daily calorie need of 1,339, or 5,624 kJ, per day (multiply
calories by 4.2 to convert to kJ lingo).
This is your new
maintenance level and is the new number of
calories you'll need to consume
daily to prevent yourself from both gaining weight and losing anymore weight.
What makes being 500
calories below your
daily maintenance level so special?
So, for example, if your
daily maintenance level is 2500
calories (again, just an example), and you consume 2500
calories per day, you will maintain your weight.
If you don't know your current
calorie maintenance level (the number of
calories you require
daily in order to maintain your current weight), you can estimate it by using one of the following options...
If you have correctly forecast your
calorie maintenance level, and then reduced your
daily intake by 500
calories per day, you should lose approximately 1 pound of fat per week, as there are 4000
calories in 1 pound of fat.
If you have a 2500
calorie daily maintenance level, and you want to drop 3 lbs of fat per week withe diet alone, you'd need a huge
daily deficit of 1500
calories, which would equate to eating 1000
calories per day.
Once you've established your
daily maintenance level of
calories, reduce your food intake so that you are 500
calories below
maintenance.
Then, once again, multiply your BMR by the appropriate activity
level below to find your
calorie maintenance level, and subtract 500 from that figure to get your total
daily calorie intake for fat loss:
For the sake of an example, let's pretend an example person estimated that their
daily maintenance level is 2500
calories.
In case it's not obvious enough,
calorie maintenance levels are different for everyone because we all have different
daily calorie requirements.
The mathematics of
calorie balance are simple: To keep your weight at its current
level, you should remain at your
daily caloric
maintenance level.
Let's assume that your
calorie intake isn't 500-1000
calories above
maintenance levels on a
daily basis.