Do you want to know how many calories you are getting from your food…..Is it too many or is it too few or is it close to your Total Daily Expenditure?
You will be able to establish your current calories the easiest way possible after reading this article.
Why do you need to check your calories?
Let’s understand this.
There is a very important and fundamental law when it comes to our body weight.
We gain weight if we eat more than we burn and lose weight vice versa. And we remain at same weight if our food intake and energy expenditure is balanced out.
It is The Law of Energy Balance. Nobody can break this law without facing consequences.
That’s why it is important to know your calorie intake. So that you can take necessary action to adjust your energy balance to according to your body weight goals.
Daily Calories you actually need
The number of calories you need on a daily basis, cannot be determined accurately. It can only be estimated.For that you need to understand BMR and TDEE. Your daily calorie requirement is simply equal to your TDEE or Total-Daily-Energy-Expenditure.
If you do not know what is a BMR or a TDEE, I have written about it here. You can also follow the links in there to calculate your TDEE.
Once you have calculated your Total-Daily-Energy-Expenditure, you know approximately how many calories you need daily.
But how do you know where is your energy balance right now. Only by knowing how many many calories you are getting from the food currently. That’s what we are trying to do here.
The hard way
You cannot measure your calorie intake exactly. But there are several ways to approximate your calorie intake.
The absolute best way and the most difficult way to do it is Calorie Counting. In fact it will get you the closest number to your actual calorie intake.
Calorie counting is not for every one. You need to meticulously measure everything you put in your mouth and note it down in an app to calculate your calories. Good luck finding a good app to cover all Indian food items. Even if you find one you can be sure it doesn’t give you correct calories. After all Indian food is, complicated!! Infinite ways of preparations and infinite different proportions.
The only way to do it better is to calculate yourself. It’s just too much time and effort and a lot of tussle with the masterchef at home.
Believe me, It’s very hard. I have done it.If you really want to do it, shoot me an email.
For now, Just forget it!
It’s not in the scope of this article.
The Easiest way
But then, we normal folks don’t have to get disheartened. There is an absolutely easier way to do it. We can estimate, if our calories are above, below or same as our TDEE. Lets call it Calorie Estimation. So how do we estimate our carlorie intake?
Follow these steps for your Calorie Estimation–
- You need a weighing balance to check your weight daily.
- Weigh yourself daily first thing in the morning after toilet and note down the weight.
- Do not change anything in your activities and exercise. Just do what you do regularly.
- Also do not change anything with your food intake. Keep it normal and don’t do anything like extreme overeating or fasting.
- Keep doing it for at least 2 weeks OR up to 4 weeks for better results.
- At the end of 2-4 weeks period calculate your average weight for each of those weeks to compare.
- If your weekly average weight is going up- your food intake is more than your TDEE. Your are in a positive energy balance on an average.
And you can guess what it means if your weight is going down or remains almost same.
So there you have it, the easiest way to establish your current calorie intake.
I will cover some simple tips to control your calorie intake with the next article.
Go read the Part-1 of this series- Calories- What does it really mean?