How Many Calories Should You Eat Per Day?
New clients have no idea how many calories they should be eating every day. And they have no idea how many they HAVE been eating. They have been flying blind.
I’ve helped thousands of clients and readers shed their excess weight permanently, many times over 100 pounds. When clients appear for their initial session, not one, out of thousands, has known how many calories they should eat.
Getting control of your weight and learning how to lose weight, guaranteed, is something all of them would dearly love, and that’s what I teach them. You can learn some basics here.
First, find your individual personal metabolic rate
When I’ve asked new clients if they know how many calories they burn per day, most have no idea. Some of the women say, “about 2000”, because they’ve heard it so many times in magazine articles and TV reports. The truth is, if many of my clients ate that much all the time, they’d gain 50 pounds a year! Don’t guess. There is a scientific way to know.
My article, Science-Based Weight Loss, explains in detail how your body is a machine that burns the fuel from food, measured in calories, like a car burns gas. I reveal the formula, and an online TEE (Total Energy Expenditure) calculator, that will tell you how many calories you burn per day. The formula takes into account your height, age, activity level and the weight you want to be, to give you the figure. Try it. For example, a woman 5'1", 39 years old with an office job who wants to maintain 120 pounds, burns about 1400 calories per day. That’s the person who would gain 50 pounds a year eating 2000 calories a day. She would have to eat no more than 1400 to keep from gaining weight.
A 6' man, same age, with an office job, would burn 2200 calories a day. He would lose weight eating that same 2000 calories a day you read about.
Life is so unfair. It’s true. Men have it easier. They get to eat more without gaining, and they lose faster when they go on a diet. Their bodies burn more fuel. Unfair but true. We may be able to correct income inequality, but not weight control inequality. Like many other unfair things in life we cannot change, we have to learn to compensate and live with it.
So, the first step in figuring out how many calories you should eat is to use that formula and calculator to find out how many calories you burn per day. If you have any trouble coming up with this, email me at WilliamAndersonLMHC@gmail.com , and I will help you.
So, how many calories a day should you eat?
Most clients, when they find out what they burn, think they should try to eat that per day. That’s a big mistake.
The goal of the training in my method is to create habits of eating the foods you like in ways that cause a satisfying weight loss and automatic weight control after that — without diets, special foods or extreme exercise. Our weight problem was caused by becoming conditioned to habits that that made us consume too many calories. We solve the problem by conditioning ourselves to habits that make us consume under the right amount.
The result is habits that have us living a full life with foods and events we cherish with an average daily consumption under our burn rate. During the periods where we want to lose weight, we engage the habits we installed to keep our average daily consumption 500 to 1500 below the burn rate, 500 for the tiny women, 1500 for the tall active men.
Getting there is a lot more complex than just knowing how many calories you should be eating and counting calories. It’s a matter of training in behavioral techniques that change us on a deeper level than simple conscious decision-making. But we start out with a very simple task for a week or two. In the beginning, all clients keep track of the calories in their normal eating, their caloric consumption of their current habits, including the “bad” choices, like snacking, grazing, overindulging and partying. They eat as they always have, but with no guilt or shame, and with a consciousness of what’s been happening, very different than what they have been doing. They have been flying blind. They had closed their eyes to what they’d been doing so it didn’t hurt them, like closing your eyes at the ugly parts of a movie. But it really didn’t help. It just kept us in the dark.
Now, instead of closing our eyes to reality, we face it, with courage and no shame. We weren’t really bad. There are far worse things people do. But it hurt us. Now we face reality with eyes wide open and a desire to love and care for ourselves. And those first few weeks are truly an eye-opener. Clients are amazed. Many start to lose weight automatically, without even trying.
In fact, some people have found their weight problem solved with that alone. Try it and see what happens.
William Anderson is a Licensed Mental Health Counselor, the author of “The Anderson Method of Permanent Weight Loss” (paperback and Kindle at Amazon, audiobook at Audible). He was obese until his early thirties when he found the solution. He lost 140 pounds, has kept it off for 35 years, and has taught thousands to successfully manage their weight.
