Being overweight increases your risk of developing a number of health problems, including type 2 diabetes, atherosclerosis and osteoarthritis. Monitoring the amount of calories you consume each day is key to losing weight or maintaining your current weight. Understanding how many calories you need each day can allow you to plan a diet that can help you meet your goals for your weight.
Calories and Weight
The number of calories you consume each day, combined with the number of calories you burn each day, can control your weight. If you want to maintain your current weight, you need to consume only as many calories as you burn each day. If you want to lose weight, consuming fewer calories than you burn is the key to long-term and safe weight loss. You need to burn approximately 3,500 more calories than you consume to lose 1 lb. of body fat. Thus, the amount of calories you can consume is closely linked to how many you burn.
Basal Metabolic Rate
One part of calculating how many calories you burn each day is to measure your basal metabolic rate. Your basal metabolic rate is the number of calories your body burns each day, regardless of your physical activity level. You can estimate your basal metabolic rate based on your weight, height, age and gender. For men, the equation is 66 + (6.23 x your weight in pounds) - (6.8 x age in years) + (12.7 x height in inches). For women, the equation is 655 + (4.35 x weight in pounds) - (4.7 x age in years) + (4.7 x height in inches).
Exercise
Physical activity also increases the number of calories you burn each day and can be an important part of helping you lose or maintain your weight. The number of calories you burn doing a physical activity depends on your size and how strenuous the exercise is. For example, you can burn 584 calories jogging at 5 mph if you weight 160 lbs., but the same activity will burn 872 calories per hour if you weigh 240 lbs., MayoClinic.com reports.
Considerations
The rate at which you burn calories is relatively steady, but if you severely cut back on calories, your body goes into "starvation" mode. This causes your metabolism to slow, reducing the number of calories you burn. Similarly, skipping meals to reduce your caloric intake can also reduce your metabolism, so plan a diet that involves that you eat regularly. Your weight may also fluctuate, based on how much water you are retaining, so if you notice your weight changing by a pound or two from one day to the next, it may not represent true weight gain or weight loss.
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