How to Calculate Calories Needed Per Day

Video Transcript

"An important calculation to know when you are designing a weight loss or weight gaining program is how many calories per day you need. This is Alice Monsaert and I'm going to give you an easy way to calculate just how many calories you should be ingesting during the day. We are going to take the weight so your current weight right now. We are going to work for simplicity with a person who is 150 pounds so 150 pounds and we are going to multiply by their activity that they do during the day so I would multiply by 10 if I did moderate activity which is going to be walking and some lightweight training. Multiple by 12 if I do hard activity if you know I'm an endurance runner or a cyclist and I maybe teach several classes a day as a fitness instructor. Vigorous activity is definitely a marathon runner. Repetitive activity would be someone who lays brick all day long or delivers UPS boxes so that is their activity level and we're going to multiply that again by the weight to get our basic calories per day. So let's do someone who has moderate activity and we are going to notice that they need 1,500 calories per day and most people say wow that seems like a lot. If you eat the right kind of food it can be a lot of food if you eat the wrong foods then you are just eating a little bit of food. So 1,500 calories a day for a person that is 150 pounds times their activity level. Now if they're on a weight loss program we want to subtract 200 to 500 calories per day so they either need to exercise more or ingest less. So this person would go down to about 1,200 calories per day. Never lower than 1,000 and really most people need about 1,500 calories a day so again a simple calculation so if this person needs 1,500 calories they would really need to up their activity level in order to stay in the 1,500 calories. So this is Alice Monsaert and I hope that you have great nutrition in your weight loss program."