How Many Calories Do You Need to Lose Weight?

Losing weight is all about calories. Too many calories put on eight......not too much fat,
not too many carbohydrates, not too much sugar, not too much alcohol but too many calories.

In order to lose weight, you must create a calorie deficit. In other words you must burn more calories than you take in. Simply put, a calorie is a unit of energy. The number of calories in food is a measure of how much potential energy that food possesses. A gram of carbohydrate has 4 calories, a gram of
protein also as 4 calories, and a gram of fat has 9 calories. Foods are a compilation of these three building blocks, i.e. carbohydrate, protein and fat. So, if you know how many carbohydrates, proteins and fats are in any one given food, you know how many calories or how much energy that food contains.

Our bodies burn the calories through metabolic processes, by which enzymes break the carbohydrates into glucose and other sugars, the fats into glycerol and fatty acids and the proteins into amino acids. These substances are then transported through the bloodstream into the cells where they are either absorbed for immediate use or sent onto the final stage of metabolism where they are reacted with oxygen to release their stored energy.

So what happens if we take in more calories than our body burns. We gain fat. An accumulation of 3500 extra calories will be stored by our body as 1 lb of fat. Fat is how the body stores energy for a rainy day. But on the other hand, if we burn 3500 more calories than we eat, 1 lb of stored fat is converted into energy and our overall fat stores are reduced by 1lb. So there it is, to lose 1lb of fat per week, we have to burn 3,500 calories more than we eat. How do we ensure that we do this?

We have 3 options.

Option 1: Take in fewer calories by adopting a healthier diet.

Option 2: Increase the number of calories that we burn by being more active.

Option 3: Do both of the above.