How Many Calories to Lose Weight Effectively?

This has always been the puzzling question, how many calories do I need? You hear to lose weight less is more! But than on the flip side you hear if it is too low than your body fights back. I never understood that because if you have gastric surgery, you end up eating less than some LCD diets suggest and lose a ton of weight. I know my greatest sucess has been doing LCD type diets. Below is what I tweeted today.


Usually when we want to lose weight, we exercise and diet right away without ever developing a program for ourselves, or consulting a weight loss expert. We think that by merely sweating it out on the track or flexing our muscles in the gym, we can achieve weight loss results right away.


There is some truth in that because a little exercise is better than no exercise at all. Time spent in each exercise is really time well-invested in improving your physical health and prolonging your life.

However, if you are really serious about losing weight, it is beneficial to understand how your body responds when eating and with each exercise done. It pays to find out how the body spends and loses energy, and how we can leverage those processes to our advantage. In your weight loss program, it's important to know and monitor how many calories have been gained (through the food we eat) and how many have been lost (through constant exercise). Correct weight monitoring saves you a lot of time and makes your weight loss program more efficient and less redundant.

There are things you should know about losing calories and just how many calories are contained in the fatty layers.

To start off, the total energy stored in one pound of body fat is roughly around 3,500 calories. What this means is that, for you to burn one pound of fat per week, you will have to burn around 3,500 calories, or create an equivalent calorie deficit. A calorie deficit is the amount of calories that are burned off by exercise and constant activity -- over and above the amount of burned calories that came from the food you ate. So, in a week, you will have to do work and exercise that amounts to 3,500 calories burned off so that you can lose just a pound of fat.

Yes, that is simple math, but 3,500 calories may be too much for the weight loss enthusiast. Assuming you plan to exercise everyday, try to divide the amount by seven. So for each day, you have to burn off around 500 calories to reach your goal of one pound less at the end of the week.

The math is easy at the outset, but there are also factors that affect weight loss and calorie burning, like the growth of muscle, the amount of food and water in your body, and everything in between. However, this number gives you a good starting point to work with, and simplifies our understanding of how many calories should be lost.

But be careful; do not try to engage in weight loss programs that take off to many pounds in a week. Do not try to get overconfident that you can lose more than 3,500 pounds in the span of seven days. The routine will leave you feeling exhausted, deprived, and burned out. Too much exercise also builds up more muscle mass than you planned to have. How many calories can you burn off all depends on you.