How many Calories do you need?

The last few weeks I have been putting together a nutritional guide that will be free to members. Its a gift from us to make sure you are complementing your hard work in the gym with good nutritional habits away from the gym. Food consumption is so important and if you are getting it wrong you will nto reach your true potential our your goal, this guide will help you get too where you want to be.
However before this guide is out I promised one client that I would put an article up on how many calories you should be consuming in a day. It is a tricky topic and at some stage you all may have googled it and come across all sorts of different suggestions and formulas for woking your calorie consumption out. Even though I am about to give you a calculation let me say that calculations are only ever an estimate. The most accurate calculation/equation to workout you daily calorie requirement is the Mifflin-St Jeor equation.
It looks like this:

For Men: 10 x weight (kg) + 6.25 x height (cm) – 5 x age (y) + 5
For Women: 10 x weight (kg) + 6.25 x height (cm) – 5 x age (y) – 161

The formula gives you what is known as you Resting Metabolic Rate (RMR), which is how many calories you burn each day without doing absolutely nothing (its basically the energy you burn to operate properly).

Now if your reading this there is a good chance that you don't do absolutely nothing all day so we need to factor in your activities. To find this out you need to multiply your RMR (which comes from above formula) by the corresponding activity factor. The activitiy factors are:

  • Sedentary (little or no exercise) = 1.2

  • Lightly active (light exercise/sports 1-3 days/week) = 1.375

  • Moderately active (moderate exercise/sports 3-5 days/week) = 1.550

  • Very active (hard exercise/sports 6-7 days a week) = 1.725

  • Extra active (very hard exercise/sports and physical job) = 1.900


So now you have the estimated calorie requirement for yourself.  You can get very detailed and workout individual days, Sunday may be a Sendentary day so you need fewr calories then Tuesday which may be a very active day. If you are trying to lean out then remeber after you exercise you should be in about a -200 calorie deficit. Do not diet though by eating nothing as this will result in you losing muscle mass not fat, to lose fat you need to exercie. For fat loss then you want to burn more calories than you consume. For guys trying to bulk up then they need to  consume more than you burn. How do you know how many calories you are burning? The simply answer is 400+ at a Hybrid Class but if you really need to know this is the only time I would recommend using a Garmin/Polar or any other heart rate-calorie counting device (again these are only estimates)

EXAMPLE using above formula:

Helen Hybris is a 32 year old female who is 172 tall and weighs 68kg. She is very active, playing sport and working out 6 days a week.

Helens RMR = 10 x 68 (kg) + 6.25 x 172 - 5 x 32 - 161 = 1434 Calories per day

Remeber this number 1434 is what she requires just to operate her organs and function properly, factor in that she is very active.

Helens true Calorie intake is 1434 x 1.725 (very active) = 2473 calories.