HOW MANY CALORIES SHOULD YOU EAT IN A DAY
- Angelique Willliams
- Mar 1, 2017
- 5 min read
How many calories should I eat a day?
How many calories do you eat in a day?
Do you know?
Have you ever recorded it to see what you are eating?
We all tend to underestimate how much we eat in a day and it's easy to do when your focus is about taste.
Let me show you how easy it is to overeat.
Say you get up and have 2 slices of wholemeal toast 40g a slice, with butter thin spread 2.4g and vegemite thin spread 2.5g, 2 eggs 39g each fried in butter, and a cup of coffee flat white caffeinated reduced fat milk mug size 250ml.
For morning tea another 250ml flat white with 2 short bread biscuits 8.8g each from the work bickie tin.
Then for lunch you grab a sandwich from the coffee shop near work a ham and salad sandwich 135g and a coffee regular 250ml again because you smelt it when you walked in and just had to have it, oh and that yum orange and poppy seed muffin medium size 163g.
For afternoon tea, a cup of tea 250ml and another sneaky bickie 8.8g from the jar.
And for dinner you went to Grill'd and had a simply grill'd burger 276g, a serve of chips regular size 260g, 2 beers ale style middy x 285ml and an ice cream on a cone double scoop to finish.
This is not an unrealistic day for most people, guess how many calories this days eating would give you?
2989 calories and let's be honest this doesn't count the sneaky lollies you have in your bag or the chip dip you would add from Grill'd or tomatoes sauce you'd put on your chips, oh and your an office worker so you are sedentary for most of the day.
It was nothing for me to consume in the past upward of 4000 calories a day as I ate a lot of take away fast foods and large serves, Macca's, KFC or Chicken Treat I did not even think about what I was putting in my mouth let alone my body.
HOW MUCH ENERGY DO OUR BODIES NEED?
Each of us has our own requirement of energy just to run us this is known as our Basal Metabolic Rate or our Resting Metabolic Rate it is the energy we require to power our brains, blink our eyes, breathe, regulate body temperature, run other various body functions like cell turn over, allow organs to perform their body tasks, hormonal functions to be carried out. This excludes movement! This is the energy required just to power you up and sit on the couch.
There's a very mysterious and convoluted equation I can show you how to estimate your requirements but being a geeky chick
and a bit Tech savvy I'll just hyperlink you to a website that does it for you:
We are lead to believe that a diet consisting of 1200 - 1500 calories is sufficient for us to lose weight whilst still supplying our bodies with what it needs to maintain itself, growth repair and development. Most of the magazine and popular diets in existence consist of no more than this amount of calories. This is what I call running on empty or often refer to as starving yourself. Given that most of us require a minimum of 12-1500 calories just to power up and sit on the couch, I think you can understand why I say it is running on empty.
Our bodies need energy to perform, move and groove and if that energy is not supplied to us the body is very efficient in trying to save its self. One of the first things your body will do if it does not get the energy it requires is to turn down your fuel burning furnace - YOUR METABOLISM, which is why when you diet your weight loss slows the longer you are on the starvation plan. Not eating enough calories is just as bad as eating too many. Your body needs to preserve energy for other metabolic processes that are essential for life, movement is not considered essential in times of scarcity.
So what does a BMR look like, I am 165cm TALL and weigh 65kg my BMR is 1374 cal +/- 111 cal per day just to power me up and sit on the couch, on 12-15000 cals I would survive on the couch but what do I need to eat to power me and have the energy to move.
Our Estimate Energy Requirement or EER takes your BMR and physical activity level or PAL to calculate your needs.
Now once again each individual has different needs and I STRONGLY advise you not to overestimate your PAL, I hear lots of people say "Oh I am VERY active" this is because we like to be viewed by others well. But over estimating your PAL will give you more energy than you need, these are the PAL definitions:
Activity level definitions.
Not at all active:
At rest, exclusively sedentary or lying (chair-bound or bed-bound).
Old, infirm individuals. Unable to move around freely or earn a living
PAL 1.2
Not very active.
Exclusively sedentary activity/seated work with little or no strenuous leisure activity
Office employees, precision mechanics
1.4–1.5
Not very active to light activity:
Sedentary activity/seated work with some requirement for occasional walking and standing but little or no strenuous leisure activity
Laboratory assistants, drivers, students, assembly line workers
1.6–1.7
Light to moderate activity:
Predominantly standing or walking work.
Housewives, salespersons, waiters, mechanics, traders
1.8–1.9
You may sweat and puff a bit.
Moderate to heavy:
Heavy occupational work or highly active leisure
Construction workers, farmers, forest workers, miners, high performance athletes
2.0–2.4
Sweat and puff and pant a bit.
Very active.
Significant amounts of sport or strenuous leisure activity in addition to 2, 3 or 4 above.
Exceedingly active and/or very demanding activities: Examples include: athlete with an almost unstoppable training schedule with multiple training sessions throughout the day or a very demanding job, such as shoveling coal or working long hours on an assembly line. Generally, this level of activity is very difficult to achieve.
Add extra PAL units
Sweat lots and puff and pant like a choo choo train.
HOW MANY CALORIES SHOULD WE EAT?
The link above gave you your BMR and your EER for each one of us our energy need would be different, compare it to mine if you like.
I exercise moderately, I go to the gym a minim of 3x's a week for between 45 to 60 minutes sustained effort various weight training moderate to intense effort and walk for an hour every day. My EER is 2198 calories a day to maintain my current weight of 65kg, I aim for 2000 calories a day and up it if I am able to go to the gym more.
I recommend that most people to eat 2000 calories each day, now when I recommend this I see the look of horror on their faces and they say "oh that's a lot of calories". If you have done the same when you read this then here's a challenge for you, download Easy Diet Diary here's the link:
Now just for one day track what you eat in a day and just see how much you do eat.
Be honest as no one will see this but you! Research shows us that monitoring and diet tracking increases your chances of successful weigh loss.
Once you've done that and have a better idea what you eat in a day keep tracking with your goal intake of your EER and just see how often you go over or under.
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