Fit Or Fat: Nutrition and Exercise

How Many Calories Should I Eat To Lose Weight?

Posting Date: 08/15/2000

Q: I'm trying to lose weight. How many calories should I be eating to go about this safely?

A: First -- use the Recommended Calories and Fat Gram Calculator to give you a guideline. Then read on?

The exact amount of calories each person should eat is a much-debated question. There are 3500 calories in a pound of fat. If your muscles metabolized 500 more calories of fat per day than they usually do, in seven days you would theoretically burn off 3500 fat calories or one pound. It seems logical to eat 500 fewer calories per day so that the muscles will have to burn fat drawn from the fat cells.

Unfortunately, it doesn't work quite that way for everyone. Let?s look at an example. For the sake of simplicity, I'm going to talk about women of average size and shape. We'll consider three groups:

Ms. Athlete: eats 2000 to 3000 calories per day; she maintains her weight.
Ms. Average: eats 1200 to 2000 calories per day; she may be near her correct weight or 30 to 40 pounds overweight, but she maintains that weight.
Ms. Sedentary: eats fewer than 1200 calories per day; she may be happy with her weight or 100 pounds overweight, but she maintains that weight.

Ms. Athlete really likes sports; she spends three to four hours a day, five days a week, exercising. She can eat 2500 calories without getting fat, while Ms. Sedentary gains weight on half that many calories. If Ms. Athlete eats 500 fewer calories a day, she can lose one pound of fat per week. Her athletic muscles are trained to burn stored fats, so her body will usually accept the 500-calorie decrease gracefully. She can lose fat easily, but Ms. Sedentary finds it difficult.

Ms. Sedentary claims to be "very active" because she leads a busy life (gardening, chasing the kids) but, in fact, she isn't able to jog for 20 minutes, is non-athletic, and is not in tune with her body. At fewer than 1200 calories a day, she exists on the edge of basal metabolic needs. She will not tolerate a decrease of 500 calories a day well. Because her muscles don't burn fat well, she will lose much less than a pound of fat per week. She may lose a pound of weight, but only part of it will be fat. The rest will be protein loss and the water loss that accompanies it. The fatter Ms. Sedentary is, the more apt she will be to lose muscle/water rather than fat.

When we consider Ms. Average, we flounder in a gray area because no one can tell her whether she is more like Ms. Sedentary or Ms. Athlete. Hence, no one can tell if a 500-calorie-per-day decrease will cause a one-pound fat loss or one-pound muscle/water loss.

It has been assumed that if a human body used to consuming 2000 calories a day is subjected to 1500 calories for a while, it will automatically draw 500 calories from fat stores. However, the body can decrease calorie requirement and turn down metabolic rate instead. If your metabolic rate decreases during a "weight" loss program, you will gain fat very quickly after the program.

Millions of people have lost 2 to 3 pounds a week on radical low-calorie diets. Most of them are fatter today than they were before. Although a pound of fat does contain 3500 calories, you do not always lose a pound of fat by eating 3500 fewer calories over a week or so.

My conclusion is that the more out of shape you are and the more fat you need to lose, the more careful you need to be about reducing calories. Instead focus on building muscle and fat burning enzymes through exercise and moderately decease calorie consumption.

Adapted from The Fit or Fat Target Diet by Covert Bailey. Copyright 1984 by Covert Bailey, published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

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