What Are Your Maintenance Calorie Levels?

When you are trying to figure out how best to lose weight, the first step you need to take is to determine how many calories you need to maintain your current levels of body fat and lean body mass. Once you determine what that amount of calories is, you can then reduce it so as to incur a caloric deficit and ensure that you lose weight in the prescribed manner. But how does one go about figuring out this number? What is the simplest and most effective way of figuring out how many calories you should be eating in order to maintain your current weight? In today's article we'll explain a simple formula, and help you figure out how to apply it to yourself.

The total number of calories you burn each day is determined by your basal metabolic rate (BMR), the general thermic effect of day to day activity (TEA), and the thermic effect of food (TEF). You can further break down the general activity portion into your exercise and your non-exercise activity thermogenesis (NEAT), giving you the formula of BMR + TEA + TEF + NEAT = total calories burned.

Now, you can get incredibly specific and careful in figuring out all of these different elements, and eventually reach a general figure or number that represents your total energy expenditure, but doing so requires very technical equipment and a lab to measure your metabolism and so forth. Does this mean it's impossible to figure out your maintenance caloric levels? Not at all, but it means that we have to take a more general approach that is not as specific as some people would like.

A good way to go is to figure that everybody burns on average somewhere between 12 to 16 calories per pound of bodyweight. If you are a very sedentary individual than you no doubt burn on the lower end, probably around 12 calories, and if you are an athlete you probably burn around 16 calories or even more.

So if you weight about 170 lbs, and say you exercise three times per week lifting weights, then you would multiply your weight by about 13 to get a total maintenance caloric level of 2210. Remember: this number is not writ in stone, but rather simply gives you an idea of where in the ballpark you fall. It does however give you a useful place to start.

 

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