Do you want to lose weight? If you are someone who has I am sure you’ve tried different ways and different diets. What do all of these methods have in common?….They create a calorie deficit.
When it comes to weight loss there is no way to get away from the science. You need to be in a calorie deficit in order to lose weight, but just how much if a deficit and what is the best way to do this in a way that doesn’t cause you extra stress or end up with you gaining the weight back again later on?
Weight loss is a numbers game. By burning more calories than you take in each day you will lose weight.
The industry standard is that in order to lose 1lb of fat, you need to burn 3,500 fewer calories than you eat. By putting yourself in a daily deficit of 500kcals, you should in theory lose 1lb of fat.
Unfortunately, while this can work for some people, it’s not actually that simple.
Studies have shown that 3,500 calories largely overestimates how much weight someone will lose as well as how much of that weight will be from fat. Researchers explain that much of the discrepancy is because of the way the body’s metabolism. It changes as your weight changes. The weight you lose comes from a combination of fat and lean tissue, which is mostly muscle. How much of that weight loss comes from fat versus muscle depends on many varying variable, and caloric deficits never target fat exclusively. So when someone says you can burn fat exclusively on a new miracle diet or fat burning workout, it’s pretty much untrue.
Understanding your BMR and daily energy expenditure
You need to have a good idea of how many calories you burn on an average day in order to lose weight effectively. According to the NHS UK, the average adult woman burns 2000kcals calories per day, and the average adult man burns 2500kcals per day. Yet this is just an average and you shouldn’t use this as your number if you are trying to lose weight. Factors that determine your energy output are age, activity level, body size, hormones, and body composition.
To get a more accurate idea of your daily requirements, you can use an online metabolic rate calculator. These help you to calculate you basal metabolic rate (BMR), which refers to the number of calories that the body burns every day just to function effectively. It’s based on your height, weight, age, and gender, according to diabetes.co.uk. When multiplied by your daily activity factor, you get your daily energy output – if you were to take in the same number of calories each day you would maintain your current weight. You should also be mindful that some of these BMR calculators do not consider your body composition e.g. Two people weighing the same but one having more muscle will have a big difference between how many calories they burn on a daily basis.
Once you understand your current daily requirement, you can create your own formula for weight loss. To put simply, as long as you eat and drink fewer calories than that number, or you increase your daily caloric burn with exercise, you will lose weight.
In terms of the 3,500-calorie rule, you would have to be in a daily deficit of 500kcals at the end of each day – resulting in losing 1lb of fat in a week. Unfortunately, that equation oversimplifies. As I have mentioned above there are varying factors to consider, so don’t expect to lose that much that fast.
You can use this link to predict your weight loss – weight loss predictor. It uses mathematical models based on your age, height, weight, and biological sex, as well as the size of your daily caloric deficit. It also provides an estimate of how many calories you need to maintain your body weight.
