Saturday Health Lesson

Today's lesson is about: How many calories does a person need/ should they have?

What is a calorie?

The definition is:

"the energy needed to raise the temperature of 1 gram of water through 1 °C"

Using that, just consider it as energy that gets used by your body.

Everyone has a BMR. This stands for Basal Metabolic Rate.

In layman's terms, this is the amount of calories your body needs to stay alive if you're on bed rest and not moving at all.

https://www.calculator.net/bmr-calculator.html

So you have your BMR, you also have to take in account your activity level.

Do you exercise, do you do manual labor, do you sit at a desk all day, etc.

All of these things will have varying levels of caloric expenditures.

This is hard to dial in completely but you can get a good estimate using online calculators such as this:

https://www.calculator.net/tdee-calculator.html

TDEE stands for total daily energy expenditure (remember calories measure energy)

So to wrap it all up, you take your BMR + Calories burned from all other actions and you'll find your caloric maintenance number.

This is the number of calories you need to stay at the weight you currently are.

3500 calories = 1lb of fat.

So if you take your caloric maintenance number and consume 500 calories less than that a day for a week 7x500=3500, you should lose a pound.

1000 less a day x7 = 7000 calories = 2lbs

The inverse is true if you want to gain weight.

There are many other variables that impact weight loss and weight gain, but at the very basic level, this is how you can calculate it.

Thanks for reading

See you next weekend for another lesson!