There are a few ways that I people can calculate their calorie and macronutrient targets…
I’ve written and spoken extensively on the benefits of tracking food and aiming for specific calories and macronutrients. In this, I say that tracking food is a wonderful short term tool top help raise awareness around nutrition, help you learn about your own habits and behaviours as well as the nutritional value of the food you eat and it can be really useful for sharing the food you eat with a professional to give feedback on.
However, I also say that
Of course it can be a brilliant tool for most though and I believe that spending a sustained period of time tracking food, planning meals and working toward specific calories and macronutrient goals can actually help you move toward a more intuitive way of eating which is long term the most viable approach.
There are a few ways that I people can calculate their calorie and macronutrient targets…
The first and by far the easiest way is to simply search for a calorie calculator on the internet, as there are loads and they all pretty much do the same job, you will be required to punch in some information about your height, weight, age, activity level and it will give you a start point to aim for regarding your calories.
Some of the best online calorie calculators are:
If however I was working it out by hand, I would do the following… For this example I will use an 80kg person wanting to lose weight.
E.g. 80kg x 2.2 = 176lbs… add the zero = 1760
This is a number we call your approximate BASAL METABOLIC RATE (BMR), this is the amount of energy needed to fuel essential processes in the body such as respiration, circulation and just general growth and repair. So this number is the number of calories it would take to maintain our weight without moving.
We do this by multiplying your basal metabolic rate by a number depending upon how active you are...
For our example I'm going to multiply our 80kg person's BMR of 1760kcal by 1.3 as they are lightly active... this gives us a total of 2,288kcal... in theory this should be the number of calories it takes to maintain this person's weight factoring in the amount of activity + exercise they do, therefore we shall call it their MAINTENANCE CALORIES.
A good rule of thumb for creating a calorie deficit is to reduce their maintenance calories by 10-15%.
For our example, our 2,288kcal minus 10% is 2,059kcal as a daily average… and for ease sake, I’ll round down to 2,000kcal
The current literature recommends that we consume between 1.6 - 2.2g of protein per kilogram of bodyweight. I normally recommend a figure somewhere in between and say 2g per kg.
For our example our 80kg person would aim for 160g of protein each day.
We could get really geeky here and give you exact fat and carb targets... however unless we're at an elite level of performance this just doesn't really matter that much and is much more down to personal preference. Some days you may prefer a more carb heavy approach and others may favour a higher fat approach. Most likely people will want a bit of freedom to do either depending upon what they fancy that day.
What is however important is that we stay rigid around keeping our calories in check, keep our activity levels constant and that we hit our protein target... the rest is flexible and largely down to personal preference.
Therefore our 80kg person in the example would focus on getting their intake from a wide variety of foods that they enjoy whilst sticking at 2,000kcal and getting 160g of protein each day and eating plenty of fruits and vegetables and the rest doesn't really matter.