What is Your Calorie Intake? Overfueled and Underactive?
Do you know what your calorie intake should be for you? It's very important to know if you’re trying to lose weight. If you don’t know how many calories you should be consuming, you might be overfueled. If you don’t burn off what you take in, then you might be underactive!
Lets first consider your basal metabolic rate, which is called your BMR. BMR is defined as the minimum energy your body requires to stay alive. You are resting, yet your body is working very hard to stay alive.
You breathe, you digest, you circulate blood, you think, you scratch. All these activities take fuel on a cellular level, yet we hardly ever think about them because they are autonomic activity. These cellular activities all contribute to your BMR. For most women, your daily calorie RDA, (Recommended Daily Allowance), is around 1000-1200 calories per day. For men, its around 1500+. That's how many calories your body requires to stay alive. However... You’ll need to add more calories to power additional activities that you do. Combine everything you do, from typing to shopping to bicycling, and you’ll have the total number of calories you require each day. All of these activities require energy to perform. If you are underactive during the day you’ll need fewer calories per day than an overactive person would. Calorie intake must equal calories output! That’s the basic formula for not gaining weight. The calories that aren’t burned off stay in the body and are stored as FAT. If you burn more calories than you take in however, stored fat has to be burned to provide energy and you will lose weight AND lose FAT. So it would seem that the way to lose weight as we get older is to cut back on calorie intake. Seems simple! Frankly, its not quite that simple is it? Lets suppose you like plain celery sticks. Now lets suppose you are on a diet. You eat LOTS of celery sticks every day for a week but don’t lose a pound. You shake your head and cannot figure out why not? I mean, C'Mon! You ate minimally all week long, starving to death eating lots of celery sticks. What gives? The problem is that your body doesn’t know you’re on a diet. It thinks you are starving to death, so its holding onto your fat in a fight for life! Your body is used to chips and fries, but you aren’t giving it chips and fries. You are feeding it celery and it dost protest! Your metabolism stops in place. No fat burning for you kiddo! Very low calorie intake diets can decrease your basal metabolic rate by 15% - 30%. Thats why starvation diets don't work.
When you stop dieting, your basal metabolism does NOT return to normal either because it thinks they’re might be another ‘famine’ coming. So any fat you take in it holds onto, preserves, and stores. Then you gain even more weight! Dieters can actually PREVENT permanent long term weight loss by going on a diet! Also, if you cut calories without knowing what kind of calories you’re cutting, you’re making another mistake. One gram of FAT contains twice as many calories as one gram of carbohydrates. Let me say that again. One gram of FAT contains twice as many calories as one gram of carbohydrates. Carbs have the added benefit of burning faster than fat anyway. Instead of cutting back on calories across the board, you’d be better off not cutting calories but instead maintaining a low fat, high carb diet that emphasizes fruits, vegetables, grains and pasta. Carb free dieters are making a dieting calorie intake mistake! Otherwise the fat you eat is likely to be the fat you carry around! So, whats the calorie RDA for you? Go to the next page to find out how to calculate it.
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