After weeks of dieting, many people reach the dreaded weight loss plateau, where the scales refuse to budge. There are several possibilities for this but one common reason is eating too many calories.Once you start losing weight you need to periodically readjust your calorie intake, usually downwards unless you've taken up a highly energetic sport!

Finding out how many calories you need to lose weight is quite straightforward. First, you figure out how many calories you use up in a day, then subtract the amount of calories you want to lose. Don't worry, it's not difficult but it will provide a helpful guide for shifting those stubborn pounds.


Despite the abundance of diets promising weight loss without calorie counting, the fact remains - eat fewer calories than your body needs and you'll lose weight.

This is often why dieters lose their motivation - they don't know how many calories they should be consuming to successfully lose the pounds. So how do we go about finding this illusive figure?

Working out your daily calorie intake for weight loss is quite straightforward. It's not an exact science but it will provide a really helpful guide to your efforts at losing weight.

Personal Daily Calorie Allowance

To start off, we need to find our personal daily calorie allowance. For years we've been drilled with the mantra - 2,000 calories a day for women and 2,500 calories a day for men. But bear in mind these figures are provided for weight maintenance for the average adult, not loss. If your personal requirement is less than these figures, just eating an extra 100-200 calories a day could be what's preventing you from losing weight.

Your daily calorie allowance is made up of two figures - your BMR (basal metabolic rate) plus the extra calories used while going about your daily business. Your BMR figure is the number of calories you use up each day just resting.

With the wonders of modern technology, there are many methods of easily finding out your BMR. A reasonably accurate BMR rating is given by a home body fat monitor scale, such as the Tanita Body Fat Monitor. Your doctor should also be able to provide you with your BMR. For a more general guide, there are several online web sites that can provide you with your BMR after entering a few personal details such as your height, weight and age.

Working Out Your Daily Calorie Expenditure

Along with your BMR reading, you need an idea of the amount of calories you use up in an average day. It doesn't have to be precise. Our daily routines vary from day to day as does the amount of exercise we do, but generally we all fall into one of the following groups:

Sedentary, lightly active, moderately active, very active or extra active.

Each of these groups burns calories at a different rate and a very useful formula called the Harris Benedict Formula will help you work out your own daily calorie requirements.

The Harris Benedict Formula

The Harris Benedict Formula helps determine your daily calorie needs.

1. Sedentary (little or no exercise) : Calorie-Calculation = BMR x 1.2
2. Lightly active (light exercise/sports 1-3 days/week) : Calorie-Calculation = BMR x 1.375
3. Moderately active (moderate exercise/sports 3-5 days/week) : Calorie-Calculation = BMR x 1.55
4. Very active (hard exercise/sports 6-7 days a week) : Calorie-Calculation = BMR x 1.725
5. Extra active (very hard exercise/sports; physical job or 2x training) : Calorie-Calculation = BMR x 1.9.

So for example, a sedentary person with a BMR of 1,600 would multiple this by 1.2 and arrive at the figure of 1,920. This is the amount of daily calories required for this person to remain at their current weight.

How Much Weight Do You Want To Lose?

First of all, decide how much you want to lose. Start off with a weekly amount, say one to two pounds a week for a safe and healthy weight loss. With one pound in weight being equivalent to 3,500 calories, this would equate to 3,500-7,000 calories deficit per week. It sounds like an awful lot of food, but provided you increase your exercise, you might not need to cut down quite so much.

Once you're armed with all these figures, you can get down to the important business of finding out just how many calories you can eat each day and lose the amount of weight you want. Perhaps it's easiest to follow an example.

Take Jenny; she has a BMR of 1,600, (calories she uses up each day just resting). Her office job is fairly sedentary and involves sitting down for most of the day. However, she exercises in a gym three days a week. So she puts herself in the lightly active category. Taking her BMR value of 1,600, she multiplies it by 1.375 according to the formula. The figure she arrives at is 2,200. So this lady can consume 2,200 calories each day to maintain her weight.

Now Jenny wants to sensibly lose just one pound a week. This equates to 3,500 calories a week or 500 calories a day. Subtracting 500 from the 2,200 daily calories she needs to maintain her weight, she finds out she can eat around 1,700 calories a day in order to lose one pound in weight each week.

Of course you don't have to rigidly adhere to your daily allowance every day in order to successfully lose weight. You can always spread out your allowance over the week and allocate more calories to days when you know you're likely to eat more, then cut back on other days.

Don't forget, once you've started losing weight, you'll need to periodically take new readings for your BMR to work out your new calorie intake to keep losing weight.Your weight loss is personal to you and once you've found your daily calorie intake to lose weight, you're far more likely to successfully lose those unwanted pounds and stick to your diet.