How Many Calories Should You Eat to Lose Weight?

A few weeks ago I created a post called "How To Create Your Personal Diet Plan?" where it was explained the three most important steps you need to take in order to create a personalized, healthy, balanced, yet effective diet:

• Establish your goals
• Determine the amount of calories you should eat in order to maintain your weight
• Determine where those calories should come from

However, it is time to step forward and know the deficit of calories you should create in your diet, in order to lose weight that comes from fat and not from muscles. So, let's get started:

Now that you know there has to be a caloric deficit (less calories than the ones needed in order to maintain your weight), and after determining the amount of calories you should be consuming daily with the calorie calculator, we have to establish your ideal caloric deficit. According to experts, it is recommended that we reduce between a 20-30% of our daily calories to reduce a healthy, average amount of weight. Why?

• If we reduce less that 20%, let's say 10% of our caloric needs, then the deficit would probably not be significant enough to have effective results. In other words, the weight loss would be too slow, and therefore discouraging for most people.
• If we reduce the 20-30%, then we make sure we are having enough deficit to lose between 1 or 2 lbs a week (depending on your current weight), and that the weight loss is coming from fat and not muscles.
• If we reduce more than the 30% of our daily caloric needs, many things could happen; the weight we lose will most likely come from fat, muscles, and organs, instead of just coming from fat, our performance at any physical activity could be compromised, we could go into starvation mode, among other consequences.

How Does This Traduce in Your Personal Diet?

Basically you simply need a calculator to determine the 20-30 % of your maintenance level: Example, if a person has a maintenance level of 1800 calories a day, and want to reduce calories in a 30%, that means he/she would be consuming 70% of the diet in order to create a proper deficit. Therefore, you can multiply 1800 * 0.70 = 1260, which is the amount of calories you should be eating with a recommended caloric deficit. 

* It is also important to remember not to go lower than 1200 calories for women and 1500 for men, which according to doctors is the minimum required amount of calories a person needs in order to keep organs such as lungs, heart, etc functioning correctly. So, if you are a sedentary woman, who's supposed to eat 1500 calories to maintain your current weight, you have two options: 1) Create a deficit of 20% or less 2) Add some physical activity to your life.

How Do You Know You're Doing The Right Thing?

If you've followed the previous parameters, then you just have to keep track on your weight loss, which traduces in getting on the scale at least once a week, preferably first thing in the morning with no clothes on, remembering always that the more your weight, the more you lose. So if you weight 300 lbs and are losing 2 lbs a week, that is perfectly fine, however if you weight 140 lbs and are losing 2 lbs a week, you are probably losing not only fat, but also muscles, which means your caloric deficit is too high. On the contrary, if you are losing lees than 0.5 lbs a week then probably your caloric deficit is too low and should be increased. Therefore, you should probably try to lose between 1 lbs to 2 lbs per week, to know the diet is working.

It could also happen that you reach a plateau after weeks on the same diet, and normally happens due to lack of physical activity, or not enough caloric deficit. So, if you've lost a significant amount of weight, you should recalculate your maintenance level, and create a new deficit.

I hope this is helpful and you can put it into practice =).