While it’s awesome to know how to find your maintenance calories, or the number of calories required to maintain your weight, the outcome is to have you lose weight. More specifically we want you to lose fat, because when you only focus on weight loss, you can end up losing both fat and muscle. If you don’t do anything to maintain your muscle while losing weight, you may not like your result if your end goal is to look toned or lean.
When you lose one pound of body tissue, it’s approximately 75% fat and 25% muscle if you do nothing to maintain your muscle tissue. This is why I will stress the importance of consuming enough protein and lifting weights, and why I don’t want you to just focus on losing weight.
The other thing to point out is when you lose weight is you lose water weight. I’ll talk more about these effects later but as you reduce the amount of carbohydrates you consume, the less water your body will hold. This will be reflected on the scale as a reduction of weight, but it won’t be fat loss. This is again why you should focus on fat loss and not weight loss.
One pound of body fat contains approximately 3,500 calories. It contains a bit more than 3,500 calories but you can use 3,500 as a thumb rule. This means, if you want to lose 1 pound of body fat per week, a good place to start is to reduce your weekly number of calories eaten by 3500 under your required weekly maintenance calories. This is why we talked about maintenance calories. It’s our starting place for losing weight.
Eating less (than maintenance)
As an example, let’s say your body requires 3000 calories per day.
3000 calories per day for 7 days means your body needs 21,000 calories per week.
If you don’t want to gain weight, you’ll have to eat no more than 21,000 calories. But, theoretically, if you only eat 17,500 calories during the week when your body needs 21,000 calories, you’d lose a pound of fat. In this example, you ate 3,500 calories less than your body needed, and so your body needed to use your existing fat stores to get the 3,500 it needed.
An easy way to use the 3,500-calorie thumb rule is to subtract your daily maintenance calorie requirement by 500 calories. Over 7 days, a reduction in 500 calories per day gives you the 3,500 calories required to lose a pound of fat per week.
Now, I said theoretically you’ll burn one pound of fat because what you do and what you see on the scale doesn’t always align. First, again, using 3,500 calories to represent one pound of fat is just a starting thumb rule. A pound of fat contains more than 3,500 calories.
Second, a body scale only measures your total weight change. Body weight is made of fat, muscle, bones, and even how much water your body holds daily. This is why I’ll later stress that you don’t want to use a scale as a primary indicator of your progress. You may not see a reduction in your weight for weeks, especially if you’re going to be lifting weights.
Increasing physical activity (while eating at a lower maintenance requirement)
Another way to burn 3,500 calories is by increasing your physical activity. Let’s say you need 3,000 calories per day based on calculating maintenance calories using a sedentary lifestyle. Then, let’s say you start going to the gym to burn an extra 500 calories per day.
If you don’t change your maintenance calories to account for the change in your extra activity while still eating only 3000 calories per day, your body still must find the extra 500 calories it needs. So, it’ll again use your fat stores.
Doing this for 7 days will put your body in a 3,500-calorie weekly deficit and you should lose about one pound of fat during that week.
Eating less and increasing physical activity
You can also reduce the number of calories you eat while also increasing the number of calories you burn when you exercise.
For example, if you calculate that you need 3,000 calories, but eat only 2,750 calories and burn 250 calories during exercise, your body still sees that you need an extra 500 calories to get what it requires.
At the end of the day, the only thing that matters is the deficit you create below your maintenance calories. And “being and staying in a calorie deficit”, is what you should be aiming for during your entire transformation.
It’s Easier to Eat Less
All this said, while a reduction in calories burned through exercise does happen, it’s not nearly as easy as reducing the number of calories you eat.
For example, running 5 mph for half an hour burns approximately 360 calories on a 205-pound (93 kg) person, or it burns 320 calories on a 180 (81 kg) pound person.
But, if you drink specialty coffees full of sugar and creams, for example, a 16 oz version of a specialty coffee can easily add 370 calories to your total daily calorie intake. This negates the 300 calories you burn during a run.
The point is, it’s way easier to just cut out high calorie foods that don’t keep you full, like donuts or specialty coffees, to keep you below your maintenance number.
You can always still have your specialty coffee. You just have to keep in mind that their calories can add up to your maintenance number fast. Which means, you’re going to have to start paying particular attention to food labels and the number of calories on menus at restaurants.
