No More Diets

How can you count the calories you are burning?

Good luck if you are trying to lose weight by counting calories! Most people get this completely wrong by underestimating what they are eating and overestimating how much they are burning. If you can be reasonably accurate then it’s a great way to lose weight - aim for a 500 calorie a day deficit to lose a steady 1lb a week without too much deprivation or trouble.

Here is a calculation tool for finding out how many calories you are burning with a whole list of different activities. You enter your weight in pounds and the duration of your activity in minutes and then get an estimate of the number of calories you used for the list of activities.

Calorie calculator

Remember that these calories are not EXTRA calories you are burning on top of the calories you would use just by sitting around - they are instead of - so you need to subtract the calories you would use just by existing to get an a picture of how much you have helped your weight loss goals.

Remember too that we all burn up calories at a slightly different rate depending on metabolism and body composition so this is an estimate at best.

I believe you can get monitors which measure more accurately how many calories you are burning but I have no personal experience with these as I don’t usually advise the calorie counting method for weight loss. Could anyone else recommend one?

I have read so many diets which all propose different calorie amounts. How many calories should I be eating to lose weight?

The simplest calculation for the number of calories you need to maintain your weight is to take your weight in pounds and multiply by 12. (Remember, there are 2.2lbs in a kilogram if you weight yourself in kilos.)

If you weigh 10 stone (or 140 pounds) that’s 1680 calories daily just to stay the same.

To safely lose weight, subtract no more than about 250 calories from that and then make sure you get active to the tune of 250 calories a day. That doesn’t have to be formal exercise - it can be doing gardening, housework, cycling or walking - anything active.

This will give you a 500 calorie a day deficit, and should result in you losing about a pound a week.

Actually I’m not that fond of calorie counting because it’s too easy to underestimate the amount you are eating or to forget to add something in and too easy to overestimate the number of calories you are burning. And even if you manage to lose weight by being meticulous in your calculations, who wants to keep calorie counting forever? When you stop counting the weight piles back on.

To my mind it’s better to forget about counting calories and to train yourself to eat sensible portions of delicious healthy food and to change how you interact with food so that you have good habits and a slim body for the rest of your life - and so that’s what I teach in my 8 week weight loss coaching program.