Average amount of calories should i eat

The number of calories in a food or drink determines the amount of energy stored in that food item. Your body gets energy from those calories when you eat them. You also burn calories doing physical activities. Every time you eat more calories than your body burns, you could gain weight. To lose weight, you need to eat fewer calories than your body needs to maintain your weight. Eating around fewer calories than you need every day can help you drop the pounds.

But first, you need to know how many calories your body needs on a daily basis. Your age, gender and activity level are three major factors that go into figuring out how many calories you should eat every day. The more active you are, the more calories you need to eat every day to maintain your weight.

Men typically need more calories than women. Also, as we age, our metabolisms slow down. So, older people need fewer calories than younger ones. Want to see how these factors work out? The first schedule has two higher calorie days and five lower calorie days. The second schedule increases and reduces calories gradually. In either case, the total weekly calorie consumption is the same. In the end, regardless of what method you choose to use when approaching weight loss, what's important is picking a strategy that works for you.

Calorie counting and zigzag calorie cycling are only two methods that are fairly interrelated used to achieve weight loss among many, and even within these methods, there are many possible approaches a person can take. Finding an approach that fits within your lifestyle that you think you would be able to adhere to is likely going to provide the most sustainable and desirable result.

Many people seek to lose weight, and often the easiest way to do this is to consume fewer calories each day. But how many calories does the body actually need in order to be healthy? This largely depends on the amount of physical activity a person performs each day, and regardless of this, is different for all people — there are many different factors involved, not all of which are well-understood or known.

Some factors that influence the number of calories a person needs to remain healthy include age, weight, height, sex, levels of physical activity, and overall general health. For example, a physically active year-old male that is 6 feet in height requires considerably higher calorie intake than a 5-foot-tall, sedentary year-old woman. Though it differs depending on age and activity level, adult males generally require 2, calories per day to maintain weight while adult females need around 1,, according to the U.

S Department of Health. The body does not require many calories to simply survive. However, consuming too few calories results in the body functioning poorly, since it will only use calories for functions essential to survival, and ignore those necessary for general health and well-being.

Harvard Health Publications suggests women get at least 1, calories and men get at least 1, calories a day unless supervised by doctors. As such, it is highly recommended that a person attempting to lose weight monitors their body's caloric necessities and adjusts them as necessary to maintain its nutritional needs. The main sources of calories in a typical person's diet are carbohydrates, proteins, and fat, with alcohol also being a significant portion of calorie intake for many people though ideally this should be limited since alcohol contains many empty calories.

Some studies have shown that the calories displayed on nutrition labels and the calories actually consumed and retained can vary significantly. This hints at the complex nature of calories and nutrition and is why many conflicting points of view on the "best" methodology for losing weight exist. For example, how a person chews their food has been shown to affect weight loss to some degree; generally speaking, chewing food more increases the number of calories that the body burns during digestion.

People that chew more also tend to eat less, since the longer period of time necessary to chew their food allows more time to reach a state of satiety, which results in eating less. However, the effects of how food is chewed and digestion of different foods are not completely understood and it is possible that other factors exist, and thus this information should be taken with a grain of salt in moderation if weight loss is the goal.

Generally, foods that take more effort to chew — fruit, vegetables, lean meats, whole grains, etc. It also results in the feeling of satiety for longer periods of time.

Furthermore, certain foods like coffee, tea, chilies, cinnamon, and ginger have been found to increase the rate of calories burned, due to the ingredients they contain. The "quality" of calories consumed is also important. There are different classifications of foods in terms of calories. This includes high-calorie foods, low-calorie foods, and empty calories. Consistent with their naming, high-calorie foods are foods that are calorically dense, meaning that there are a high number of calories relative to serving size, while low-calorie foods have fewer calories relative to serving size.

Foods such as fat, oils, fried foods, and sugary foods are examples of high-calorie foods. Being a high-calorie food does not inherently mean that the food is unhealthy however — avocados, quinoa, nuts, and whole grains are all high-calorie foods that are considered healthful in moderation.

Low-calorie foods include vegetables and certain fruits, among other things, while empty calories, such as those in added sugars and solid fats, are calories that contain few to no nutrients. Studies have shown that there is a measurable difference between consuming calories of carrots compared to calories of popcorn. As previously mentioned, this in part can be attributed to differences in how the foods are consumed and processed.

Carrots require far more chewing and can result in more calories burned during digestion. Again, the mechanism for these differences is not fully defined, but simply note that for weight loss purposes, the general formula of calories in minus calories out determining weight gain or loss does hold, but that the number of calories on a nutrition label is not necessarily indicative of how many calories the body actually retains.

While there is no clear-cut or ideal amount of macronutrient proportions a person should consume to maintain a healthy diet or lose weight, eating a "healthy" diet replete with a variety of unprocessed foods such as vegetables, fruits, and lean meats is correlated with being healthier, and is more likely to result in sustainable weight loss.

Many of these calories fall under the category of empty calories. For example, a pound person will burn just calories during a minute walk at 3. If the same two people swam the front crawl for 30 minutes, the pound person would burn calories, and the pound person would burn calories. So, a heavier person will burn more calories than a slim person, but muscle burns more calories than fat.

If a muscular person and an overweight person exercise at the same intensity, the muscular person will burn more calories than the overweight person. For simplicity, we will use an average weight person exercising for 30 minutes at a time to illustrate which activities are best at burning calories:.

Aerobics — calories Skipping — calories Rowing — calories Skiing — calories Running — calories Swimming — calories Playing tennis — calories Walking — calories.

Everything from housework to gardening — even taking a bath! And even low-impact exercise can make a difference. Research from the Journal of Physical Activity and Health found that regular yoga helps lost weight stay off. If you choose the calorie-counting method to help you lose weight, there are lots of ways to make things nice and easy to help you along:. It takes into account your BMR, the activity recorded by your tracker and any activities you log manually.

BMR is the reason your tracker starts the day with calories already burned — you still burn calories in your sleep. It tracks your weight and calculates a recommended daily calorie intake. It also contains a well-designed food diary and an exercise log. The app tracks your progress towards your goals and offers chat forums with fellow users. MyFitnessPal also has a barcode scanner, so you can also instantly enter the nutritional information of some packaged foods.

This will save time when it comes to working out the calories. It offers more tracking hydration, sleep, body fat etc ; more detailed nutritional reports; more features for meal and exercise planning, and a wider range of challenges including the ability to create your own. Think of a tennis ball. This really is a great way to lose weight. Trick your mind into thinking that you have more food by downsizing your large dinner plate for a smaller, salad-sized one.

A healthy portion can look tiny on a huge plate. However it will seem more normal when you shrink its surroundings. And spoil your appetite with nutritious low calories snacks. Try eating celery sticks with peanut butter an hour before lunch or dinner. A good guide is to keep breakfast under calories , lunch under calories , and dinner under calories.

Limit the number of snacks you have during the day. There are also plenty of meal ideas under calories so no need to get bored eating the same thing week after week. Also, keep eating a wide variety of nutritious foods. Sana explains that mums who are breast feeding should ensure that they are eating lots of fresh fruit and vegetables. Keep your blood sugar levels balanced to ensure you have the energy for yourself and the baby. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, an extra to calories is needed to help your body keep up the milk supply for your baby.