When you finally have decided that now is the time, now you really want or need to lose weight, one of the first questions popping into your mind is “How many calories should I eat?” or “How many calories should I cut?” If you want to get these questions answered and plan your diet easily, read on!

Your calorie intake while dieting depends mainly on two factors and let’s first have a look onto these:
- what is your calorie maintenance level (the amount of calories you can eat where you neither lose weight nor put on weight)
- at what speed do you want to lose weight (the faster, the harder to do!),

How many calories do you need to eat for maintenance?
Your calories needed for maintenance are influenced by your gender, your current weight, your height, your age and your activity level. If you feed these data into a BMR calculator, you will get your personal result calculated within seconds. That part is easy and gives you already an estimate about how many calories you should eat at maximum. For weight loss it has obviously to be below that value. But how much?

How many calories must be cut to lose weight?
Now, we all would prefer to lose weight at a speed of 10 pounds in 5 days etc. These and similar high promises are often done within the weight loss industry, but a result like this is unlikely and even unhealthy. Opt for something more realistic and get an idea how fast you want to lose weight. It should be fast enough to show some results and keep you motivated but slow enough to be doable and enable you to stick to your diet for as long as it has to be. Being rather weeks to months than 5 days!

Calculate your calorie deficit
Say you want to lose those 10 pounds not in 5 days but 5 weeks, this is still 2 pounds per week and equals a calorie deficit of 7,000 calories per week, or 1,000 calories per day that you either need to eat less or exercise off. Each day! Even that is not so easy, but doable.

Calorie deficit calculation:
Daily calorie deficit = pounds you want to lose x 3,500 calories / number of days you want to diet
Example: 10 pounds x 3,500 / 35 days (5 weeks) = 1,000 calories = daily calorie deficit

Now the only thing left to do is to take the value of your daily calorie deficit off the amount of calories needed for maintenance and then you know how many calories you should eat when you want to lose those pounds!

Stay in your daily calorie limit
To make sure that you are staying within your daily calorie limit, use a calorie counter or track your calories manually. This may first sound to be too much of an effort, but is necessary to avoid frustration as people tend to underestimate the calories they consumed.

Guest author: Claudia Ohst from dietonautopilot.com

Grab pragmatic advice about one way backlinks – go through this web site. The time has come when concise info is truly within one click, use this possibility.