At 500 calories a day, you would have to eat 250 fewer calories and exercise to burn off the ohter 250 calories. To lose 2 pounds a week, this would be increased to 500 calories each from food and exercise. Any more than this isn’t a good idea because you would start to lose some of that valuable hard-body muscle that you worked so hard to build. Losing muscle would also mean that your metabolism would slow down, and I know you don’t want that.
If you’re trying to lose weight, you should consume between 10 and 15 times your body weight in calories per day. A more accurate way would be to first determine your basal metabolism rate (BMR). Your BMR is the amount of calories that it takse for your body to function. Following are the steps to find your daily calorie requirements, using my numbers as an example:
1. First divide your weight by 2.2 to get your weight in kilograms:
145 / 2.2 = 66 kilograms
2. Multiply that number by your appropriate BMR factor (men = 1, women = .9):
66 x .9 = 59.4
3. Multiply that number by 24 (for the hours in a day) to get your BMR:
59.4 x 24 = 1, 425 calories (BMR)
4. To find your activity level energy requirements, multiply your BMR by the appropriate percentage:
40-50 percent of your BMR: sedentary home body (armchair athlete)
55*65 percent of your BMR: lightly active home body (trains up to 1.5 hours a week)
1,425 x .75 = 1,068 calories (lower-limit activity level)
1,425 x 1 = 1,425 calories (upper-limit activity level)
5. Add your BMR and activity level requiremnets to get your daily calorie requirement:
1,425 + 1,068 = 2,493 calories
1,425 + 1,425 = 2, 850 calories
