- What's up guys? It's your girl, FrumpyFit.
And if you don't know who I am, I'm an online weightloss coach
who is dedicated to calling out all the BS in the fitness industry,
and providing you guys with accurate fitness, nutrition, and weight loss information.
So today, what are we doing?
I'm teaching you exactly how to calculate your calories for your weight loss goal.
And this is specific to you.
So if you follow along, we're gonna take a look at your age, height, weight, sex, and specific goal,
and that's how we're gonna get that number that is specific to you.
So if you plan to follow along, grab a pen and paper
or open a new notes page on your phone, and let's get started!
Now step one is to calculate your BMR, or your Basal Metabolic Rate.
So I'm gonna do so by going to a website, I'll provide the link in the description,
and I'll also put the website up on screen so you can watch as I'm doing it.
But your BMR is essentially how many calories your body burns
when you're in a coma, doing the bare minimum for survival.
So we are not considering any exercise at all, not even brushing your teeth,
not even blinking your eyes, that's what your basal metabolic rate is.
So we're gonna get that number using this website,
and I know in the URL it says BMI, but we're not calculating that.
We don't use that here, we don't know her, BMI is trash, okay?
BMR is the number that you're looking for.
So for today, I'm going to use the example of Jane Doe.
She is this mysterious woman who is 30 years old,
150 pounds, 5'5'', and a female.
So we're gonna plug that information into the website,
but I want you to plug in your specific information in order to get your specific numbers.
So we type all that in and we get that Jane Doe's BMR, basal metabolic rate, is 1,472 calories.
That means that's how many calories she burns per day
when she's in a coma, when she's got nothin' else
goin' on in her life, she's just layin' there.
Now we're moving on to step two, where we're actually calculating
how many calories you burn in the day.
This includes all of the things like blinking, brushing your teeth.
All the activity that you can do throughout the day, in addition to your BMR, okay.
That's called your TDEE, or your Total Daily Energy Expenditure.
I'll provide the link in the description 'cause I'm going to another page on this website now,
but you can also just follow along on screen 'cause this part's really easy.
Now what we're gonna do is we're gonna multiply your BMR by an activity factor,
and this is using the Harris Benedict Equation.
And the key here is to be really honest with yourself about how active you are.
Most people are overestimating how much activity and exercise they're doing on a weekly basis.
So, I'm gonna give you the guidelines of kind of
how I decide what activity factor to multiply the BMR by.
As you can see, there are different categories
all the way from no activity to very, very active.
And so you're gonna pick the number that best suits you.
For my clients, who's goal is weight loss,
I usually multiply their BMR by an activity factor of 1.45.
They're usually weight training four to five times per week,
amongst other physical activity that I have them doing.
You can see that 1.45 is right in between light and moderately active,
so you don't have to just use those numbers that are in each category,
you can kind of go in between if you feel like you don't fit right into one.
So we're gonna multiply Jane Doe's BMR of 1,472 by 1.45 and we are gonna get
a TDEE, Total Daily Energy Expenditure for Jane Doe that is 2,134 calories.
So that is how many calories Jane Doe is burning per day.
All right, so the third and final step, we're literally almost done guys,
is determining your specific calorie goal.
And the way that weight loss occurs is by energy balance manipulation.
So that means that we're looking at
how many calories you're consuming through food, calories in,
and how many calories you're burning through exercise, and our BMR combined,
and that balance is gonna determine
whether we gain weight, lose weight, or maintain our weight.
So in order to lose weight, we have to consume fewer calories than we burn,
so calories in through food is lower than our calories out, which is our TDEE.
So we calculated that for Jane Doe, it's 2,134.
So then the question becomes, how low should you go?
And the answer to that is, with simple math, okay?
One pound of fat equals 3,500 calories.
So in order to determine how much fat you're gonna lose per week,
you will divide that number of calories that equals those pounds of fat by seven.
So if you wanted to lose 1 pound of fat per week,
you would divide 3,500 by 7, which would give us 500 calories.
So, that means that we have to eat 500 fewer calories than we burn.
I always recommend the calorie deficit between 250 and 500 calories per day.
Deficit meaning that's just how many fewer calories you're eating than you're burning.
That's gonna put you in a weight loss range of half a pound to one pound per week.
I know that might sound discouraging, and it might sound slow, but it's not.
Losing half a pound to a pound every single week is amazing progress
and the only reason people think it's slow is because we've been conditioned to think
that we can get these fast results by all these quick fix fitness professionals
and reality TV shows like "The Biggest Loser."
You can watch me talkin' about that somewhere up here.
I don't wanna get too crazy ranting, but the recommended amount of weight loss
per week is between one and two pounds.
Anything beyond two pounds, we're potentially having negative health effects,
and we're getting into an unsustainable weight loss method
in order to acheive those results, which usually leads to us quitting
and then gaining the weight back anyway.
So remember to do this with your numbers, but for Jane Doe,
I'm gonna go ahead and take her TDEE of 2,134 and subtract 250 calories from that
to get her half a pound per week weight loss goal.
Then I'm gonna subtract 250 calories from that again,
which will give us our 500 calorie deficit, or losing one pound per week weight loss goal.
And you don't need to be really strict if you're tracking calories,
you don't have to hit it on the single calorie mark every single day.
I like using a range.
So in this case, if we're using the range of half a pound to one pound per week of weight loss,
Jane Doe's range would be 1,884 to 1,634.
You can be a little bit flexible.
There's no reason you should be obsessing over hitting every single little number.
We don't wanna go there, we don't wanna make it that serious, everything's gonna be fine.
And I have to mention that there are lots of different methods
for calculating your calories, this is just the one that I use specifically for myself and for my clients.
And the thing to keep in mind is all of these calculation methods are fairly inaccurate.
And I know you don't wanna hear that because I just told you how to calculate it
and now I'm telling you that number's probably not even accurate,
but we use this number as a base line, as a starting point.
So when you start tracking your calories and you're hitting your calories consistently,
you can use the scale weight as a gauge to see how accurate this number was.
So if you are eating at a 500 calorie deficit every day for two weeks,
and you don't see a change on the scale,
it's not that you're doing something wrong,
it's that that number may have not been perfectly accurate.
So I recommend following your calorie range for at least two weeks,
assessing your results, and if you haven't seen the results that you should expect,
half a pound to a pound per week, then adjust your calories by 250
and repeat the process until you start seeing the results that you are expecting.
Once you start seein' those results, do not drop your calories any more,
unless you stop seeing results for a significant amount of time.
The scale weight naturally fluctuates, so we don't wanna make changes too quickly.
And it can be really hard to be objective as just you,
being objective to decide if you're not losing weight
when you should be seeing results, it can be really hard.
So there are kind of a lot of different ways that this potentially could go wrong.
If you get frustrated and you don't know what you're doing wrong,
something's not clicking, I can go ahead and be a resource for you,
so reach out to me if you feel you need it.
Sometimes it could be really nice to have a coach to just do it for you.
But I promise you can do it on your own if you put your mind to it.
That's the end of the video.
If you want a written reference for this information,
I wrote a blog post and I put that link in the description box below.
If you found this helpful, please give it a thumbs up,
share it with someone it might be beneficial with, and subscribe to my channel.
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As usualy, thank you so much for watching.
I'll see you next time! Okay, bye!