Anyone who has ever tried to lose a few pounds knows that calories are what counts. Literally. Consuming fewer calories than you burn off is the cornerstone of every successful long-term weight loss plan.
So, what is a calorie, anyway? Besides being a word that loses all meaning if you say it over and over again in your head, a calorie is actually a unit of energy – and you thought you were done with physics in high school. It is the amount of energy it takes for a kilogram of water to increase in temperature one degree Celsius. Keep that in mind for when you’re on Jeopardy!
The calorie is most closely associated with food energy, and by association, watching one’s diet. If you take in more fuel than your body needs to keep you alive and to build up other tissues like muscle and skin, then your body will put some away for a rainy day. By this, of course, I mean you’ll store it as fat. Chances are that’s the opposite of what you want.
So how do you know how many calories you need each day? There are a number of websites that can give you a rough estimate of how many calories you need daily to maintain your current weight. Women usually need fewer calories per day than men do, but there are other factors that determine a person’s caloric requirement. Someone with a sedentary lifestyle (their only exercise consists of pushing buttons on a remote control and taking trips to the kitchen and bathroom) would need substantially fewer calories than a soccer player. Your natural metabolism, determined largely by age and genetics, also has a say in how many calories it takes for your body to be the well-oiled machine it can and should be.
A woman who wants to lose weight should try keeping a food journal for a week or so to get a sense of what she eats on a day-to-day basis and to get an approximate calorie tally. In this age of food labels and the Internet, it is almost impossible not to know how many calories are in any food item. The simple act of keeping a food journal has been shown to cause people to eat less, since they don’t want to admit on paper that they really had five cookies instead of two.
Knowing caloric intake is a great way to start eating healthier, but of course that’s not the whole story. You must eat the right foods in order to make your body feel good and to fuel it with nutrients. You could potentially lose weight if your diet consisted of nothing but a 1,000-calorie quad stacker from Burger King every day. However, I guarantee that your energy levels, breath odor and bowel movements would suffer.
That said, a 3,500 calorie deficit is equal to one pound of weight loss – basically, you could lose a pound per week (a healthy rate) if you burn an extra 500 calories or eat 500 fewer calories each day. Most women who want to start dieting can expect to eat around 1,200 to 1,500 calories per day, but everyone is different. Just try to get a feel for your caloric intake, eat right, exercise and notice whether your weight goes up, down or stays the same that week. Then, make adjustments. Above all, don’t obsess; these things take time. You’re more than just a calorie machine. Best of luck!