That seems shocking to you, doesn’t it? I’m sure the thoughts rushing to your mind center around the fact that your entire life people have probably told you that the only way to lose weight was to cut calories, and eat less. That’s true, but what they don’t tell you is the number of calories you’re supposed to eat.

Has anyone ever given you the formula to help you decide what the proper number of calories (specific to YOUR body and YOUR habits) that you should eat to “cut?” Or has someone just thrown numbers at you?

When I was a senior in high school I was eating around 1,200 calories a day (NOT sustainable and NOT healthy) because that’s the number I read that was the lowest amount you should ever eat. I was naïve and thought that eating so little would just make me lose weight faster. Wrong. I thought it was perfectly healthy. Wrong.

When I was a freshman in college I downloaded an app that calculated my calories based on my height and weight. It told me 1,400 calories was okay. Wrong.

Now, you might be inwardly panicking because you’ve heard these exact numbers and you’ve eaten them in an attempt to lose weight. Or maybe you’re rolling your eyes at me, knowing you’ve eaten these calories and believe that it was healthy. In either case, please read on so you can begin to understand just how different everyone is, and that you may not be eating enough calories every day.

This next part is going to sound like a math lesson, but in order for you to understand how or why you should cut calories to lose weight, you need to understand what a caloric deficit is.

What is a Caloric Deficit?

A caloric deficit is when you eat less calories in a day than you burn (or expend, use up, etc.) and it is necessary to lose weight. This part is simple math (and I’ll use my own caloric settings as an example):

If I burn 2,378 calories a day and I eat 1,878 calories per day, then my deficit equals 500 calories. This means that I have eaten 500 less calories than I have expended, so my body has had to use 500 of the calories it has saved up in order to fuel my body for the 500 calories that I didn’t feed it.

By the way, most calorie calculators are going to have you eating at a 500-caloric deficit each day and here’s why: it takes 3,500 burned calories to burn/lose one pound. If you eat at a caloric deficit of 500 calories per day for seven days, then you’ve burned 3,500 calories in one week, and thus one pound!

Moving on: Learning How Much You Should Eat!

There are a couple steps we need to take in order to figure out how many calories you should be eating per day and I’m going to spell each one out for you so it doesn’t get confusing.

Step 1: BMR

BMR stands for basal metabolic rate, which is just a fancy way to say: BMR = the amount of calories your body NEEDS just to function (if you laid in a bed for 24 hours and did absolutely nothing).

To provide you with how to calculate your BMR I’m providing you with the link of a website I used to calculate mine right here: https://www.bodybuilding.com/fun/bmr_calculator.htm

Honestly, this step isn’t necessary for helping you find the amount you need to eat every day, because that number is going to be higher than this one. The point of showing you how to calculate your BMR is because it’s probably going to be much higher than what you’ve been eating on a calorie cutting diet, and I want you to understand how bad that is.

Your BMR is the amount of calories your body NEEDS just to function all day, so the logic follows that you shouldn’t eat less than that number per day!

Step 2: TDEE

TDEE stands for total daily energy expenditure, which means that this is the number of calories your body burns based off your daily activities. Using more energy requires more calories to fuel it!

The link to calculate this number is here: https://tdeecalculator.net/

Let’s talk about the information this website tells you: your maintenance, cutting, and bulk calories and your BMI.

The number that this website spits back to you is going to be your maintenance calories. Maintenance calories mean that this is how many calories your body burns each day, so if you eat the exact same amount, you are going to maintain your body weight.

To find your “cutting” calories, scroll down the website to the section titled “Macronutrients.” You can then click the “Cutting” tab and there it will tell you what your cutting calories are, and if you’re interested in bulking (eating a lot to build muscle and gain weight) then you can click that tab for that information! An easier way to find your cutting calories is simply to subtract 500 from your maintenance calories!

The last piece of information that I will mention from this website is BMI, which stands for body mass index. Don’t even acknowledge this number. The BMI simply takes into account your height and weight and based off of that claims it knows whether you’re healthy or not.

For example: my height is five feet one inch and my weight is 165 lbs. My BMI is 31.2 and says that I’m obese. This is false.

The BMI doesn’t take into account someone’s body fat percentage, and thus can’t know if someone’s weight is made up of mostly fat or mostly muscle. A body builder who weighs 250 lbs. and has a body fat percentage of 10 would have the same BMI as someone who weighs 250 lbs. and is the same height of the body builder but has a much higher body fat percentage.

BMI doesn’t matter, ignore it!

I want to add in a comment about eating at a deficit. Do you recall that earlier I described the deficit as meaning that the body had to use up energy it had stored to fuel the body when we don’t eat the exact same amount of calories that we burn? That doesn’t just mean that the body burns up fat. If you don’t eat enough (as in significantly less than the number of calories you burn each day) then your body may not just “eat up” fat, it can burn your muscles too. That’s the last thing you want! For one, we need our muscles to live and function every day, but additionally, the more muscle we have the more calories we burn! You don’t want to lose muscle if you want to burn fat!

I hope learning this information is as useful to you as it was to me. As someone whose body burns around 1,800 calories per day, but who has eaten between 1,200 to 1,400 calories a day when trying to lose weight, it was shocking! Not only does this allow for me to eat enough to be satisfied all day, but I know I’m fueling my body and muscles every day.

Remember, no one will ever love you like your body does. No one will ever work as hard for you, just to let you breath, as your body. Don’t treat your body like it needs to be punished for being hungry, treat it like your best friend, because that’s what it is.

As an end note, I am not a personal trainer or dietitian, these tips come from my own experiences and knowledge I’ve gained through them.