Let’s go back to the basics. What are calories ? Calories are units that measure energy. When it comes to health, fitness, and the human body, calories are the fuel we use to live life.  This is not an exaggeration. We use calories to walk, talk, breathe, and blink. We refill on calories from what we ingest. What does this have to do with weight loss, weight gain, and overall weight management? The basic rule is if you eat more calories than you burn, your weight should go up. Conversely, if you burn more calories than you eat, then your weight should go down. The magic number is 3500. 3500 calories equates to 1 lb. How do you manage this ? How do you know how many calories you burn on a daily or how many calories you should eat?

The key to all this is your Basal Metabolic Rate, your BMR. The basal metabolic rate represents the calories we burn from just being alive. Remember what I said before,  literally everything we do  requires calories. How do you find out your basal metabolic rate? You can use these  formulas from healthline.com based on a paper written by M D Mifflin 1, S T St Jeor, L A Hill, B J Scott, S A Daugherty, Y O Koh:

Men:  10 × kg weight + 6.25 × CM height – 5 × age + 5

Women: 10 × kg weight + 6.25 × CM height – 5 × age – 161.

This formula doesn’t really help us with our weight management since it doesn’t take into consideration the calories we burn due to our daily misadventures. So I suggest you use calculator.net. You can plug in all of your measurements and you will get a BMR and a few other suggested BMRs based on your daily pursuits. Based on calculator.net my BMR is 2268 calories, if I train 4 to 5 days a week moderately my BMR goes to 3323 calories.

When we are aiming to lose weight, we should first get our BMR. we need to be in a net negative caloric deficit. As previously mentioned every time you hit a net negative 3500 calories, you should drop a pound. I am not telling you to starve yourself. If you read anything I have written you should know I am not a fan of crash dieting. A good healthy deficit is about 500 – 750 calories. Anything above 750 is aggressive and may not be sustainable for a prolonged period. For example, since I do train 5 days a week, if I want to be in a caloric deficit, I would reduce my daily  calories to 2600 to 2800.

Want to gain weight? Then you have to be in a  net caloric surplus. If I want to gain weight, I would increase my daily calories to maybe 3800. 

 Again please don’t just go out and stuff your face with fast food or starve yourself and say that I told you to do so. You should also consider your macros. Macros are extremely important to make sure that although your weight will go up or down you will do so in a healthy manner. You can read up about macronutrients in my article “It’s All About Macros”.

Key takeaways:

• Calories = unit of energy 
• Everything thing we ingest has calories , everything we do we burns calories
• You lose weight when you in a net deficit, you gain weight when in a net surplus

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