How to lose weight

A lot of people ask me for advice about weight loss, so I thought I would make a page about it.

How to Lose Weight

Keep in mind that if you’re trying to lose weight, the only way to do so is to create a calorie deficit (meaning your body uses more calories in one day than it takes in.) A lot of people think that this means you have to do exercise to burn off all the calories you’ve eaten in a day. This isn’t true. Your body burns a lot of calories during the day, even if you’re just screwing around on Tumblr all day. : )

So how many calories does your body burn during the day? Everyone is different, but you can use some tools to get an idea. To find out, start by calculating your BMR (basal metabolic rate.) For example, at my current weight my BMR is 1419. This means that even if I was in a coma, I’d still burn 1419 calories a day.

Next, take your BMR and use the Harris Benedict Equation to figure out how many calories you actually burn (you aren’t in a coma, right?) Sticking with my example, this equation tells me that I actually burn around 1951 calories a day. So, theoretically, all I have to do to lose weight is eat less than 1951 calories a day.

It takes 3500 calories to make a pound of fat, so to lose a pound that means I have to create a calorie deficit of 3500 calories. So if I eat 1451 calories a day, I’ll be creating a calorie deficit of 500 calories a day which would equal one pound lost a week.

Isn’t math fun? : )

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Okay, it has become clear to me that not everyone is good at math. (Don’t sweat it, neither am I. I took recreational math in college!) You can apply the principles I discussed above using the information from these calculators:

Daily Calorie Calculators:

http://caloriecount.about.com/cc/calories-burned.php

http://walking.about.com/cs/calories/l/blcalcalc.htm

http://calculators-free.com/bmr-and-daily-calories-burned-calculator-9

These calculators might give you slightly different results, but they will be very similar.