Believe it or not, being healthy is not actually about weight. You don't REALLY care what the numbers are. You just want to feel good and look good. Eating the right amount of calories is the KEY to both losing weight and gaining weight (if that's your thing). More importantly, the quality of those calories will determine how you FEEL. No matter how thin you get, you will feel like garbage if you keep eating garbage. Write this down: "My stomach is NOT a trash compactor"
If you’ve been storing away fat like a bear getting ready for winter, it means you’ve been eating more than your body needs. That part is obvious. The part we forget is that getting unhealthy happens slowly. Barring some kind of alien abduction scenario, you probably won't wake up one morning 200 pounds heavier than the previous day. Fat grows silently over time. Like a flower, or love or a tumor. You became unhealthy slowly and you're going to improve it slowly.
How Many Calories do I Need?
BMR stands for Basal Metabolic Rate. Let’s say you were trapped on a mysterious island after a plane crash. Your Basal Metabolic rate is the minimum amount of coconuts you need to eat so that you don’t DIE. Our bodies need calories to keep our organs running, to power our massive energy sucking brains, and to keep our cells and muscles functioning.
Click the link below to open a BMR calculator. Enter your current information to figure out your current Basal Metabolic Rate. Or, if you have my excel metabolic calculator you can just use that.
http://www.bmrcalculator.org/
Put in the following stats for a fake person. Let's call them... Professor Guggenheim. Age 25, Female, 150 pounds, 5 foot 9 height.
The calculator says Professor Guggenheim has a BMR of around 1491 calories per day. That’s the amount of calories that would keep her from looking like Skeletor and dying of a starvation heart attack. The problem with that BMR number is that we want to do MORE than just be minimally alive. We want to do awesome stuff like swimming with dolphins, fire dancing or reading People magazine. So Professor Guggenheim needs to bump that calories number up a bit.
The Harris Benedict Equation
Since we want to do more than just not die, we need to add calories to our BMR to get the amount of calories our body needs for our level of activity. There are calculators that use body fat % to determine your calories and these are much more accurate.
1. If you sit on your rear all day and do basically nothing active, multiply your BMR by 1.2
2. If you do light exercise 1 to 3 days per week, multiple your BMR by 1.375
3. If you do moderate exercise 3 to 5 days per week, multiple your BMR by 1.55
4. If you do heavy exercise 6 to 7 days per week, multiple your BMR by 1.725
Let's say Professor Guggenheim exercises 3 times per week; we would multiply her BMR by 1.55 to get 2,311 calories per day. This is the amount she needs to maintain his current body. You should NEVER EVER eat below 1.2 times your BMR. Anything less than eating at the sedentary level is a starvation diet and will only HARM you in the long run. You will lose weight, but it will not be permanent because your body will eventually realize you are starving and it will fight the weight loss by slowing your metabolism and digesting your muscles. And the more muscle you lose, the harder it will be to not look like you are made of marshmallow. So never eat below 1.2 times your BMR.
Start by deciding you want to feel better. Calculate the number of calories you should be eating and just eat that. We'll worry about eating better foods later. For now, just get your eating portions in control.
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