How Many Calories Do You Burn Off?
In order to lose weight, you have to burn off more calories than you take in. Unfortunately, there's no way around it. And starving yourself won't work because even if you did starve yourself, your metabolism would shut down, so you would be starving yourself for nothing.
The body has a defense mechanism built into it that you can't do anything about. If you suddenly just stopped eating, then your body would think it was starving. So to help protect itself from dying of starvation, your metabolism would nearly stop, meaning you're not burning off calories, so you can't lose weight. It does seem as if everything is stacked against you at losing weight.
There are all kinds of so called miracle products out there to help you lose weight, but the only way to lost weight besides surgery, is an old fashioned and even depressing lifestyle change. Not diet, but lifestyle change. You have to burn off more calories than you take in, so you must eat foods with lower calories, limit the portions of what you eat, and exercise to burn off more calories.
To help lose weight, you should know about how many calories you burn off and then to count how many calories you take in.
To know how many calories you burn off a day, you need to figure out your Basal Metabolic Rate. That is how many calories you burn off just to be alive. Even when you do nothing, your body is burning off calories. It takes calories just to breathe and have your heart pumping and organs working. If you stayed in bed all day, then your Basal Metabolic Rate is how many calories you would burn off. This depends on your weight, height, gender, and age. The older you get, the less calories you burn off. And the more you weight, the more calories you will burn
There are calculators online where you can type in your information and get your BMR. This may not be 100% but it's close enough to help you know what your BMR is. You can go to http://www.bmi-calculator.net/bmr-calculator/ to figure out what your BMR is.
Now you want to know about how many calories you are burning off in a day. Assuming you aren't in bed all day you will burn off more calories depending on your activity level. The more active you are, the more calories you will burn off. If someone is playing sports every day and very active, they'll burn off a lot more, while someone who is sitting all day won't.
Now you need the Harris Benedict Equation. You take your BMR and multiply it by the number in the Harris Benedict Equation depending on how active you are.
1. If you are sedentary : Calorie-Calculation = BMR x 1.2
2. If you are lightly active: Calorie-Calculation = BMR x 1.375
3. If you are moderatetely active : Calorie-Calculation = BMR x 1.55
4. If you are very active : Calorie-Calculation = BMR x 1.725
5. If you are extra active : Calorie-Calculation = BMR x 1.9
So if your BMR is 1650 and you are lightly active, then you burn off about 2,268 calories a day and you need around this many calories a day to maintain your current weight. But you want to lose weight, so you need less than 2,268 calories a day.
If you reduce your caloric intake to 1,700 a day then you are burning off 568 more calories than you take in and if you keep this up, you will soon notice you are losing weight. If you start exercising regularly, you will burn off even more calories and lose more weight. If you became moderately active, you would burn off 2,557.5 instead and if you took in 1,700 calories, you would burn off 8557 more calories than you took in.
