News.com.au has enlisted the help of some fitness experts who state that following these five steps will help you understand how many calories you need to have to gain, maintain or lose weight.
Calculate your baseline
This is the amount of calories we automatically burn each day called our resting metabolic rate.
My Fitness Pal App helps your calculate this based on height, weight, age and gender,
As a rough guide, women need a minimum of 1200-1400 calories each day while a man needs around 1400-1800 calories.
Create a deficit
To lose 0.5-1kg of body fat each week, you will need to create a calorie deficit of 200-300 calories each day.
Watch your portion sizes and cut back on high calories foods like cake, biscuits, chocolate and alcohol which contain at least 200-300 calories per serve.
Add an activity
"As a general rule of thumb we will need at least 200 extra calories per hour of physical activity that we do.
"That means if you go to the gym for an hour and are a small female trying to lose weight eating 1200 calories, most likely you will need more calories or 1400-1500 calories to lose weight when you are exercising."
Pay attention to your belly
If you are eating a lot of calories already but are still hungry all the time, this is your body telling you that you need more calories.
Adding extra calories isn't bad if done right and they say that the best time to add an extra 100-200 calories is early in the day, at either breakfast or lunch or before the time that you exercise.
Check your macros
The wrong balance of our key macronutrients — protein, carbs and fats — can impact our ability to burn body fat as well.
"For example, diets that are low in carbohydrates (50-100g) but not low enough to shift us into ketosis (less than 50g carbs for most people) can actually be too low for the body to efficiently burn body fat."
You will be able to drop about 1kg a week by maintaining a 30-45% carbohydrate, 30% or less of fat and 25-30% protein diet.
Hopefully this helps you whatever your desired goal may be.
