If you’re at a point in your life where you’re thinking that it’s time to lose some weight, then you should keep two things in mind:
First, know that you are not alone. There are very many people that come to a point where they need to cut off some extra weight, so don’t get too down about it. While some may not do much about their extra weight, a huge number of people do take action. However, not everyone’s effort is successful or effective to any significant degree, which leads to the next thing.
Second, understanding how to effectively lose weight is absolutely critical in order to ensure effective weight loss occurs. With so many people constantly looking for easy ways to shed off extra weight, there’s quite a large market for various weight loss plans. However, try not to waste your time with all of the newest dieting trends or overpriced weight loss plans that you see on TV because there is only one factor that determines weight loss: calories consumed versus calories burned. Anything besides something that controls that factor is only a money maker, not a weight loss tool.
Controlling calories to lose weight is no secret to anyone, but it’s an extremely important idea that is often overlooked or not fully understood. That’s why understanding the details about burning calories to lose weight is a must. The must-know in order to lose weight is how many calories you need to burn to lose weight.
So, how many burned calories does it take to lose weight?
It has been determined that there are about 3,500 calories in a pound of fat. So, the simple answer is that you need to burn 3,500 calories for every pound of fat you wish to lose. Of course, the simple answer leaves a lot of things out especially since this doesn’t really help unless you understand how exactly you should approach burning those calories. Therefore, we should look take a look at a less simple answer.
Since calories essentially act as energy supplies for our bodies, our bodies burn a certain number of calories every day to supply our everyday energy even if we just stand all day. This number of calories depends on the individual’s age, gender, weight, height, and average level of daily activity. This number is called our Basal Metabolic Rate, or BMR, and you can figure out your own BMR by using a BMR calculator.
Thus, in order to maintain ourselves, and maintain our weight as it is, we would need to take in the number of calories that our body uses daily. However, if we were to take in less calories than we need to burn in order to maintain ourselves on a daily basis, then our bodies end up using calories from our stored fat deposits.
So, creating a calorie deficit causes your body to use stored calories by burning the fat on your body. Specifically, for instance, a 3,500 calorie deficit would result in losing about one pound of fat. However, research indicates that a person can only lose 1-2 pounds of fat per week before the body begins to eat its muscle to provide itself with energy, which decreases your metabolism and makes it easier to gain weight. Fasting to lose weight is not only very ineffective, but it’s also unhealthy. To learn more about why it is unhealthy to lose more than 1-2 pounds per week, you can read Can I Lose 10 Pounds Fast?
To finally answer the question about how many calories you need to burn to lose weight, the body needs to burn about 500-1,000 calories each day to lose weight effectively and healthily, which equates to 3,500-7,000 calories per day, or 1-2 pounds. In order to do this, you must calculate your BMR and then subtract 500-1,000 from that number to see how many calories you should eat every day in order to create an effective calories deficit.