Calculating A Calorie Deficit For Weight Loss (Set Up Your Deficit!)
Getting into a calorie deficit isn't
as complicated as most people think. I'm gonna explain how you can start
calculating a calorie deficit for weight loss. Hi, it's Ivana, helping you get fit
healthy and strong at any age. If that sounds good, please
subscribe to my channel. A calorie is a unit of energy.
So if you wanna lose weight, then you'll want to burn off more
calories than your body needs to maintain itself. If you give your body more
calories than it needs on a daily basis, then you'll be in a calorie surplus,
and you'll start to store fat. There are a lot of
strategies for weight loss, but they all rely on getting
into a calorie deficit
because that's how you lose fat. You don't actually have to calculate a
calorie deficit in order to lose weight. And I've got another video coming up
where I'm gonna explain another strategy that you can use if you
don't wanna calculate.
So make sure you subscribe to my channel, but if you do wanna track and monitor
your calories so that you know that you're as accurate as you possibly can be. The first thing that you need to do
is determine maintenance calories. That's the amount of calories that your
body needs just to maintain the weight that you're at right now. Now that means there's gonna be no
gain in weight and no loss in weight.
And this can vary by about
200 or 300 calories a day. It's kind of a moving target. It's not like your maintenance
calories are static. So all the calculations that we're doing
here are obviously just an estimate, but they do give you a good
guideline to work from. Most of the calculators that
you're gonna find online, that help you determine your maintenance
calories are going to be a bit of an overestimate. So to keep things simple, I like to use a really easy
multiplication: just 13 times, your body weight in pounds, in order to determine your maintenance
calories.
For someone who's very active, it might be 14 or 15 or 16
times your weight in pounds to determine your maintenance calories. I prefer to stick with that 13 times
your body weight in order to get a more conservative estimate. So let's
start there. So if you're 180 pounds, your maintenance calories are
gonna be about 2,340 calories. How much weight do you wanna lose? So safe and effective weight loss is
considered to be about one to two pounds per week. Now I love math, but I know people wanna keep these
things as simple as possible. You can also estimate it by
saying 0.8 to 1% of your body weight per week. And this is how we account for the fact
that someone who's much larger can lose weight faster than someone who's
already close to their target weight.
If you're 300 pounds, you can safely
lose up to three pounds per week. But if you're only at
150 pounds, you probably only wanna lose
up to 1.5 pounds per week. You'll probably find that you'll lose
weight faster at the beginning when you're a bit heavier and further from your goal
than when you get closer to your goal weight. So let's use
a very simple example. Let's assume that you wanna
lose one pound of weight a week. That's realistic and practical. So that equates to about
3,500 calories per week. That you're going to have to
deduct from what you are consuming, or you're gonna have to burn them off.
Now, if we divide that by seven days, you're looking at 500 calories per day
in order to lose that pound a week.
So you'll need a 500 calorie deficit
per day in order to lose a pound a week. Changing your diet alone will work really
well if you're on the heavier side. So let's say you weigh about 250 pounds. That means that your maintenance
calories would be 3250 calories per day. Dropping 500 calories a day from your
diet means that you've been consuming 2,750 calories per day. And
that's pretty reasonable. That's a decent amount of food, but let's say you're a smaller
person who only weighs 150 pounds. That means that your
maintenance calories are 1,950. And if you wanted lower that by 500
calories in order to get that deficit, then you're down to 1,450 calories a day. And that's not a lot. There's a general minimum energy
intake that we consider to be reasonably healthy in order to provide
your body with the micronutrients.
And that's the vitamins and minerals that
you need in order to keep functioning and to keep healthy for men,
we consider that lower range 1800 calories per day. And for women,
it would be about 1200 calories per day. And that's the absolute minimum of
calories that you should be consuming. So forget those 800 calorie a day diets.
Please! If you don't weigh as much, and you're a smaller person, it's a little
bit more challenging to lose weight. That's also why as you lose weight,
it becomes harder and harder. There's only so many calories
you can drop down to. It's easier to lose weight when
you have more weight to lose. So if you have 50 pounds to lose, you're gonna find those first 30 or 40
pounds a lot easier to take off than the last 10 pounds.
When you get
closer to your target weight, you're gonna have to fine tune things a
little bit more when you get relatively lean. And I'm gonna talk about how someone who's
more advanced and very close to their goal can make changes. Ideally, you wanna use a combination of diet
and exercise in order to produce weight loss. So you want to reduce your
calories in and increase your calories out. When I do online coaching, I tend to look at both sides of the
equation for each particular person. And I wanna find the way that's
going to be easiest for that person.
What's going to be the best way of
them achieving the calorie deficit. And what's gonna cause them the
lowest amount of discomfort to change. Being more active can certainly increase
your calorie deficit and help you to lose weight. But there's a limit on that. And it's gonna depend on whether
you are currently sedentary, whether you're moderately active
or you're very active already. So if you're inactive right now,
mostly sedentary in your job, and you're not doing any
workouts or formal exercise, then you have the most space in order
to increase the calorie deficit through your physical activity.
If
you're moderately active, there's certain things you can play with. But if you're already very active in
that you're walking a lot. You have, let's say three to five workout
sessions in the gym every week. There isn't as much for you
to work with. And chances are, if you are that active, you're gonna be fairly close
to your target weight anyway. So that means you have to be much more
specific and you'll probably need to track your calories more carefully in
order to make sure that you continue to be in a calorie deficit and get leaner.
So let's go back to that 500 calorie a
day deficit that we want. And ideally, as I said, it's best to split
those up 250 calories of activity, and then reducing our caloric intake
by about 250 calories per day. So you can burn off those 250 calories
a day through a formal workout. It'll probably take
about 45 minutes. I mean, a lot of this depends on your body
weight and how intense you are with the physical activity that you're
doing. If you're working harder, you're gonna burn more calories.
If you're working longer, you're gonna burn more calories. So let's say you're at the gym or working
out at home three to five days a week.
That's probably going to be enough
for those days. And on alternate days, you can also increase your activity by
walking, let's say 30 to 45 minutes. You might not have time to do your
workout and walking on the same day, but you wanna make sure that you're
trying to burn off approximately 250 calories a day. If you're very busy during the week
and just attempt to walk for about 30 minutes a day, and then you can make up some of
that calorie burn on the weekend, because we're really looking
at a weekly goal of 3,500 calories.
If you don't burn off
any additional calories one day, you can make them up on another day. But don't get too carried away and just
do nothing for five days and then hope that you're going to be able to
make up the activity on the weekend. That's not likely to work. I personally like to do additional
activity on the weekends, whether it's going for a walk or doing
some kind of sport with my family. That's how I burn off additional calories, probably more than I have
time to do during the week. So if you're playing tennis for an hour, you're going for a long
hike or a long bike ride, then potentially you could burn
off 500 calories on a Saturday and 500 calories on Sunday. That also means that you won't have to
worry about reducing your caloric intake on the weekend so much. And that tends to be when a lot of people
over eat or at least eat a little bit more in a calorie surplus, and don't get
that deficit just from their nutrition.
Now, reducing your calories
in by 250 calories a day, generally, isn't that hard
to do. If you have a donut, you just skip that donut for the day.
Sometimes those can be 300 calories. So reducing the amount of treat foods
overall during the week and then on the weekends as well, can help just
whittle those calories down. You only need to reduce your
calorie intake by 250 calories. If you are doing additional
exercise as well. Once you've been in a calorie deficit of
approximately 3,500 calories a week for about three weeks, that's when you wanna
make sure that you check your progress.
I mean, you do wanna monitor along the
way. It is helpful to weigh yourself. It is helpful to take a look at how your
clothes fit, whether you feel leaner, whether you see any
difference in the mirror, remember that there are natural variations
in your weight from day to day or week to week. So you don't always wanna
get caught up just with the weight loss. If you start to see changes
leanness in your arms, your legs, particularly around the waist, that tends to be a good
indicator for a lot of people. Then your calorie deficit is likely
working and you can keep it going. Now you might have to make adjustments.
If you don't see any of those changes. If after two to three weeks, you're
really not seeing any signs of progress. And you've been trying to eliminate
those 500 calories per day. Then you want to adjust
and work your way down.
It doesn't actually mean that you're
doing a greater calorie deficit. Chances are that your
estimates are a bit off. Maybe you're forgetting certain
things that you're eating. Maybe you're not burning off as many
calories because you're not pushing yourself as hard as you
can during your workout. Or maybe you're not walking at the
pace that you think you're walking. Remember that everything
is always an estimate. So if you are not seeing changes, then
it means you've estimated incorrectly. If you've actually been tracking and
monitoring your calories with an app, like myfitnesspal, where
on a day to day basis, you're entering in all your food and
you see that the numbers are where you think your calorie deficit should be.
Whether you've decided to go
500 calories less per day, because it made sense for you or whether
you've decided to reduce your calorie intake by 250 calories a day, and then burn off an additional 250
calories through physical activity. You're going to see if you're in the
right calorie deficit based on the results that you're achieving. So you may
not be entering the foods correctly, or you might not be getting
the quantities, correct. Or you just might be missing something, perhaps there's fats and sauces and
things that you're not adding to your totals. So that's when it pays to take a closer
look and start to bring those calories down again. I've already mentioned that it takes
more effort as you get closer to your target weight. So if you're down to the last five or
10 pounds of fat that you wanna lose, you wanna get quite lean, then
you really have to be specific.
Maybe you need to be more focused on
the intensity of your cardio so that you know that you're
getting it high enough, or you need to go a little bit
longer with your cardio sessions, or you need a weight training workout
that's pushing you a little bit harder. So there are a lot of different ways that
you can approach both sides of it for the calorie side.
It tends to be just trying to be much
more accurate and absolutely everything that you eat has to go into the app so
that you can have an accurate number. And if it seems like you're doing that,
but you're still not getting the result, then it looks like you might just be
one of those people who needs a lower calorie intake in order to lose weight. And that's what you'll have to do unless
you decide to work a little bit harder, add an extra workout each week,
do a little bit more walking. It's always up to you
how much you want to do. I just prefer the mix of nutrition and
exercise because it's just a healthy, balanced lifestyle. It tends to go
together. It makes you feel better.
It is possible to do just diet
alone or just to exercise alone. Although exercise alone is
very challenging and you
need to commit to working out quite a lot most days in order
to burn off sufficient calories. Let me know in the comments, if
there's anything you didn't understand, or if you'd like me to help you figure
out your calorie deficit correctly. Please hit the like button.
If this video is helpful, it helps my channel reach more people.
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