calories, how many should you be eating?
Calories can be confusing. How many should you be eating? How many are in a piece of cake? Are all calories created equally?
In a world of conflicting information, it can be hard to know where to start. In today’s blog post I’m going to give you the advice you need so that you can make a start on your fitness journey.
WHERE TO START…
The first thing I suggest doing is using this next week to make a food diary of your normal diet. Write down everything you consume, your daily meals, random snacks here and there, fizzy drinks with sugar, teas or coffees with milk and sugars, cooking oils, sauces, anything that contains calories must be noted. Be honest with yourself.
Once you have done this, add up your calorie intake for each day. You can try entering it into MyFitnessPal or look up the nutritional value of your foods on the internet and add them all up. Once you have got the calories for each day, add them all up and divide it by the number of days you’ve tracked for. This will give you your average calorie intake.
ADJUST ACCORDING TO YOUR GOALS…
From here you need to think about your goals. If you want to lose weight, take 10-20% off your average calorie intake. For example, if your average was 2500, you’d take 250-500kcal off and be left with 2250 or 2000 calories.
If you want to gain weight, up your calories between 10-20% so using 2500 as the example still you’d jump up to 2750kcal or 3000kcal per day.
Some of you may be wondering, what even is a calorie? A calorie is a unit of measurement, used to measure the amount of energy in our food. This will be displayed on your food label as ‘KCAL’. Foods are made up of different amounts of carbohydrates, fats, and proteins, all of which contain a certain amount of energy.
MACRONUTRIENTS…
Fats contain 9kcal per gram
Carbs contain 4kcal per gram
Protein also contains 4kcal per gram
And alcohol contains 7kcal per gram
So now that you have your daily calorie amount and know how calories work, you can use MyFitnessPal or any other tracking method to make sure you hit your calorie intake for the next couple of weeks and see how you get on!
Remember, this will only work if you’re completely honest with yourself and track absolutely everything! You also need to keep an eye on your energy expenditure (steps, exercise etc.), so make sure you’re staying active!
NEED HELP?
Feel free to send me a message on Facebook, Instagram or via e-mail (conormoranpt@yahoo.com) if you’re struggling with this or have any questions, I’d be happy to help.