I advise against counting calories on a day to day basis because the numbers will start to feel like shackles. When you eat a balanced diet of wholesome foods and listen to your body’s needs, calories tend to sort themselves out. However, if you have never considered what your dietary needs are before, or if you just want some concrete information to help you get started, you might find it useful to do a little math and calculate your daily caloric needs.

The three steps below make up the Harris-Benedict Equation (HBE). The equation was created by a guy named Harris J. Benedict back in 1919 and is still widely accepted today.

1.    Calculating Your Basal Metabolic Rate: First you need to calculate your Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) which is simply the base amount of calories your body burns every day just to survive and perform all necessary bodily functions. Your BMR is basically how many calories you would burn if you were awake but didn’t move your body at all.

Women    BMR = 655 + (4.35 x weight in pounds) + (4.7 x height in inches) - (4.7 x age in years)
Men    BMR = 66 + (6.23 x weight in pounds) + (12.7 x height in inches) - (6.8 x age in years)

2.    Factoring In Your Activity Level: Next, you need to factor in your activity level and figure out how your lifestyle affects your metabolic rate. Keep in mind that some days you are more active than others, so you would want to adjust your caloric needs based on your activity level each day.

Sedentary    Little or no exercise and a desk job.     BMR x 1.2
Lightly Active    Light exercise/sports 1-3 days per week.     BMR x 1.375
Moderately Active    Moderate exercise/sports 3-5 days a week    BMR x 1.55
Very Active    Hard exercise/sports 6-7 days a week    BMR x 1.725
Extremely Active    Hard daily exercise/sports and an active job    BMR x 1.9

3.    Adjusting To Meet Your Goals: Finally, you need to determine your goals. If you are looking to lose weight, you would want to create a caloric deficit either by increasing your activity level, eating fewer calories, or a combination of the two. If you want to gain weight or gain muscle mass, you would need to increase your intake. For weight loss, creating a 300 – 500 calorie deficit in your diet per day is considered safe. Anything more than that would have the counter effect of slowing down your metabolism and wouldn’t be worth it. The best way to create a 500 calorie deficit is to eat 250 fewer calories and burn the other 250 calories off through exercise, anything more your burn off from exercise is a bonus.

Theoretically, if you created a 500 calorie deficit every day for one week you would lose one pound of body weight, since there are 3500 calories in a pound. Of course, if you are gaining muscle at the same time you may not see the pound go down on the scale but you will be losing inches off your size.

These formulas can be useful guidelines, but they are not the final word on your body or your weight. Generalized formulas do not take into account individual variations and these variations can be profound! For example, the Harris-Benedict Equation above, as widely used as it is, doesn’t even account for body composition, like lean body mass.  Lean bodies require more calories than less lean bodies and while you can plug your weight into a formula like this one and come up with a number, that formula won’t account for your individual body composition. One person can weigh 150 pounds and have big bones and lots of lean muscle while another person can weigh 150 pounds and have small bones and lots of body fat.

You have to take these calculations with a grain of salt. There is some safety in numbers and if you’ve been eating 5000 calories a day and now after making these calculations you realize you were eating 3000 too many, then that’s good information to have. Otherwise, use these numbers as general guidelines and then forget about them and just listen to your body. The tips in this book are all geared toward reinforcing your mind-body communication so that you can properly respond to your body’s needs. Once you’ve got that down, the calories sort themselves out!