How to Calculate Your Total Daily Calorie Needs

Video Transcript

"An important calculation to understand when designing a nutrition program is how many calories you need per day. Let me give you a simple formula to figure out how many calories you need based on your weight and your activity level during the day. Say our current weight is 150 pounds. We are going to use that number and these are just the calories that you need to sustain life during the day. It doesn't take into your activity so we are going to multiply by 10 if you have moderate activity during your day which would be possibly walking, walking the dog, doing some simple weight lifting, heart activity if you do repetitive activities during the day. You've done a cycle class and some weight training. Intense would be repetitive activities and again repetitive activities are something that would be a person delivering boxes all day or delivering bricks so we take that and we multiply it by 150 and we're going to use 12 as our activity level today and we get 1,800 calories that are needed for this person. Now in designing a weight loss program they're going to subtract 250 to about 500 calories per day to get the number of calories they are going to ingest. So this person if we subtracted 500 calories, they would need 1,300 calories per day and then it of course depends on where those calories should come from. They should come from a mixture of carbohydrates, fats and proteins to have the best nutritional source. So again a simple formula for you to figure out how many calories that you need. This is Alice Monsaert. Please stay healthy."