Weight Loss Calories - How Do They Really Work?

Weight Loss Calories – How Do They Really Work?

Posted November 18, 2009 By Karen

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Are you confused about how to manage weight loss calories so that your weight goes down as quickly as possible? If so, you are not alone. Most people hit a road block when it comes to figuring out how many calories they need to eat, what those calories should be made up of, and how much they really should burn off.

This is just the beginning of the mountain of questions that most people have about calories when they first start losing weight or trying to maintain a particular weight as they grow older. Lucky for us all, the truth is not nearly as complicated as most make it out to be.

A calorie is simply a unit of energy. Food is made up of these calories and your body breaks them down to support all of your bodily functions and to get you through the demands of your everyday life and exercise routine.

Therefore, the amount of calories you should consume goes up with your activity level, as more energy is in demand.

Here’s the issue: most of us eat a lot more calories than we actually need to fuel our daily activity level. We eat like lions and live like house cats. Naturally, the human body takes the excess calories and stores them in case they are needed later on.

The trick to turning this around is to start eating less than you really burn off. You create a calorie deficit when you move your body more (burning calories) and eat less. When you do this simultaneously, your body will be forced to pull those deficit calories from your stored fat cells.

So, the more of a deficit you can create, the more you can lose. Except, there is a catch here. You can’t deprive your body too much or it will cling to that stored fat rather than releasing it. This means weight loss will slow down or stop completely.

Your system will feel as if it is starving and cling to fat as a survival method. You will have a slower metabolism, which means your body burns off less calories and releases less energy than it would without feeling starved.

The minimum calorie limit for women is 1200, and for men it is 1500. If you regularly eat fewer than this, you risk hitting this survival plateau.

Basically, you need to stay above that minimum weight loss calories range but keep it a bit lower than what you burn off in a day. Figure out your BMR and the approximate number of calories burned through exercise, and balancing is a little easier than you may think.