How Many Calories Do You Really Need?

People seem to get so obsessed by the latest fad diets, even if they don't actually help you lose weight and get healthier. Usually these fad diets will start when so and so guru trainer says to eat x, y an z, while your favorite pop star has switched to a special elimination diet and there’s always one superfood that we should supposedly all be eating if we want to lose weight and be healthier.

When it comes to diets, calories are a confusing subject. While some people may rely solely on meticulously counting calories, others might ignore them completely and only focus on simply eating healthy foods. Regardless of whether you count your calories or not, the calories you wat definitely do matter.

If you're looking into diets yourself, you may be wondering how many calories you really need. We're gonna be looking at what exactly you'll need to do know about calories.

Diets like this will come and go, but one thing that will never change is calories.

Regardless of what type of plan you’re following, calories matter. All these fad diets rely on a special gimmick to make them seem appealing, but what they all have in common is that they restrict calorie intake to some degree, whether that’s by dictating portion sizes, removing certain food groups, or simply limiting your food intake, they ensure that you’re consuming fewer calories.

A calorie is a unit of energy. In scientific terms, one calorie (kcal) is the amount of energy needed to heat a cubic liter of water by one degrees Celsius. In layman’s terms, they’re your body’s source of energy. You need calories to burn for energy and to survive – without calories, you’d die. Simple.

To lose weight and burn fat, you must be in a calorie deficit. This means you need to consume fewer calories than you burn, but this is where it can get tricky. How do you know exactly how many calories you actually need to eat to make sure you’re burning fat?

You may think that the easiest way to do this would be to severely limit your calorie intake the whole time. There’s no doubt this will put you in a deficit, but it could also cause several complications.

Over time, your body will adjust to such a low intake and your metabolism speed will slow to a snail’s pace. That’s if you even get that far before you’re so overwhelmed with hunger, fatigue and lethargy that you don’t bin your diet and head straight for the cookie jar instead.

So balancing calories is vital. Few enough to lose weight, but not so few that you crash out.

Clearly, everyone needs a different number of calories, depending on age, weight goals, lifestyle, activity levels, and body composition, and while it’s impossible to gauge the amount of calories you need with 100 percent accuracy, you can get pretty close using certain guidelines.

One such guideline is the calorie recommendation chart published by the United States Department of Agriculture. It states that to maintain weight, you should consume the following number of calories each day.

Women

Aged 19-30

1800-2000 for a sedentary lifestyle, 2000-2200 for a moderately active lifestyle and 2400 for an active lifestyle.

Aged 31-50

1800 for a sedentary lifestyle, 2000 for a moderately active lifestyle and 2200 for an active lifestyle.

Aged 51+

1600 for a sedentary lifestyle, 1800 for a moderately active lifestyle and 2000-2200 for an active lifestyle.

Men

Aged 19-30

2400-2600 for a sedentary lifestyle, 2600-2800 for a moderately active lifestyle and 3000 for an active lifestyle.

Aged 31-50

2200-2400 for a sedentary lifestyle, 2400-2600 for a moderately active lifestyle and 2800-3000 for an active lifestyle.

Aged 51+

2000-2200 for a sedentary lifestyle, 2200-2400 for a moderately active lifestyle and 2400-2800 for an active lifestyle.

How to Change The Guidelines To Suit Your Goals

Goal Setting

As a starting point, you can’t really go wrong following your daily recommended calorie intake.

Provided you accurately pick your lifestyle activity levels, the calorie intake you go with should be about right to keep you in good health.

However, remember that these guidelines are for maintaining weight, not necessarily for losing weight, or even for gaining muscle. To lose weight you must consume fewer calories than you burn, while building muscle requires a surplus of calories.

As a rough guide, take 300 to 500 calories away from your theoretical intake if you’re looking to lose weight, or add 300 to 500 if building muscle is your goal.

Accuracy

While it may sound great on paper that you can simply pick a calorie number and go with it, it’s not quite as simple as that. Everybody responds differently to calories, and while your metabolism or genetics are very rarely an excuse for being overweight, they do play a part on how your body deals with calories.

Someone with a slower metabolism and more prone to storing fat will likely need fewer calories than the guidelines, whereas someone who is naturally lean or carries more muscle mass will be able to get away with eating a lot more.

Health and Food Choices

The guidelines don’t take food choices into account at all.

In theory, you could meet your guideline recommended daily intake by eating burgers, pies and cake. This clearly isn’t healthy, but you would, by the letter of the law, be sticking to the guidelines.
Alternatively, you could pick much healthier foods, full of protein, vitamins, minerals, healthy fats and fiber, eat the same number of calories as your junk food diet, yet look and feel much better.

Calories are critical, but they’re not the only aspect you need to consider when dieting.

Monitoring Progress

Calorie manipulation is a very useful tool in maintaining your progress in the gym and on the scales.

This relates back to the concept of fad diets and extreme calorie cutting as discussed earlier. If you have an idea of your calorie intake, it’s extremely easy to make small changes in your diet to keep you progressing towards your goals.

If your weight plateaus one week, you can simply reduce your intake by 50 calories per day. Likewise if you’re training for muscle and strength gains and are feeling weak and lethargic, an extra 100 calories can do you the world of good.

Without tracking your intake, you have no idea whether you’re over-consuming calories or not, and are taking a stab in the dark when it comes to making changes to your plan.

Counting Calories

Calorie counting doesn’t have to be a chore.

You can go the old-fashioned paper and pen route, or you can use one of the many tracking apps or websites and count your calories in a matter of minutes every day.