How Many Calories Per Day To Maintain Weight?

You have to eat so many calories per day to maintain weight once you reach your goal weight. Since losing weight is basically a matter of eating less calories than you burn off (this is oversimplified as there are other factors such as they types of foods you eat and how easily your body can convert them to fat etc..), then if you could figure out how many you would need to maintain your goal weight, you could gradually lose what you needed to get to that weight by modifying your calorie intake to match.

Figuring your calories per day to maintain weight is rather complicated. There are many factors involved such as age, body fat percentage and metabolic rate.

A professional nutritionist might be able to get you a fairly accurate number, but you can get a ballpark figure by multiplying your goal weight by 14 if you are moderately active or by 12 if you are somewhat inactive. That is a very rough estimate of your caloric needs.

If you are looking to simply maintain your weight, then keep a journal of what you eat and add up the calories - unless you are currently gaining weight, then this is the amount of calories needed to maintain!

If you are overweight and trying to lose weight, figuring out how many calories per day to maintain weight that you currently eat is one way to figure out how many calories you would need to lose weight. You need to be honest with yourself and write down every little thing that you eat for a week or more. I mean everything. Even those little snacks that you sneak that you won’t even admit to yourself that you are eating!

Once you have that, you can figure out the calories per day (just average them over the weeks span as you probably eat more on some days then others). If you want to lose weight at a safe rate, choose to lose 1 - 2 pounds a week - each pound is 3500 calories so you would need to decrease your caloric intake by 500 to 1000 calories a day - or increase your exercise to burn that much more per day or a combination of both.

Of course, you will be much healther and feel great if you budget your calories per day to maintain weight to include lots of fruits and vegetables and lean meats with some whole grains. That’s what I call a lower carb diet!

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