How many should you burn a day

It's a tale as old as time: In order to lose weight, you need to move more and eat less. But understanding how much more to move can be confusing. That's because the amount of calories you need to burn a day to lose weight depends on many factors, including your weight-loss goal , how much you're eating and how you're burning those calories. While weight loss may be your primary goal, physical activity serves up many health benefits , like better joint mobility, protection against chronic disease, enhanced mood and improved stamina.

So, beyond burning calories, know you're doing your body a world of good when you move more. To lose 1 to 2 pounds per week, you'll need to burn to 1, calories more than you eat each day — or 3, to 7, calories per week.

The total number of calories you burn in a day depends on things like your age, height and weight, muscle mass and how much you exercise, according to Kansas State University. There are several formulas to calculate your exact total daily energy expenditure, or TDEE more on that in a minute , but there's also a simpler method based only on body weight. While it's not as accurate, it can give you a starting point to work from without having to do a lot of math:.

Sometimes referred to as basal metabolic rate BMR , this is the total number of calories your body needs each day just for basic functions think: breathing, blinking, etc. In general, your RMR is higher if you're younger and have more muscle, but your genetics plays a role, too.

TEF is the calories your body uses to digest, absorb and store the nutrients from the food you eat. Certain foods have been shown to have a higher thermic effect than others, meaning your body burns more calories to process them.

These include foods high in protein and fiber, especially. This number varies greatly from person to person, and even from day to day, depending on your activity level. Just how many calories you burn during a workout depends on how long and how intensely you exercise.

To lose weight, you'll need to do some simple math and create a calorie deficit based on your TDEE, which means you burn more calories than you consume. First, calculate your total daily energy expenditure based on the formula above.

This will give you your maintenance calories, or how many calories you need a day to maintain your current weight. One pound of fat is about 3, calories, according to the Mayo Clinic. So, if you want to lose 1 to 2 pounds per week a generally healthy and sustainable goal , you need to burn between and 1, calories more than you consume each day — or between 3, and 7, calories per week.

You can achieve this calorie deficit by eating fewer calories, burning more calories through NEAT and exercise or a combination of the two. Noom gives you the support and tools you need to stay focused and achieve your weight-loss goals. The original formulas for calculating this number are as follows, using pounds for weight, inches for height, and years for age.

For example, a year-old, pound, 6-foot-tall man has a BMR of 1, For example, a year-old, pound, 5 foot 6-inch-tall woman has a BMR of 1, From there, you must figure out your activity level. The activity levels the equation uses are as follows :. For example, a postal worker who walks all day for their job would have an activity level of 1. A desk worker who walks several times a week for exercise would have an activity level of 1.

As you can see in the above examples, activity level has a lot to do with how many calories a person needs each day. How much you burn has to do with how much you weigh. For example, people will burn the following number of calories in 30 minutes of doing these tasks based on their weight:. To use it, simply input your activity, time spent doing it, and your weight. Yes, males and females burn calories at different rates.

This is why sex is included as a variable in the equation, along with age and weight, which also affect the number of calories a person burns. Males generally have less body fat than females. They also tend to have more muscle mass. More muscle means the body burns a higher number of calories while at rest. So, generally speaking, males usually burn more calories than females overall. Once you know how many calories your body needs to maintain your current weight, eating fewer calories than this will usually lead to weight loss.

For example, a person with a calorie need of 2, per day to maintain their current weight can lose weight if they eat 2, calories per day. As an alternative, you can eat the same number of calories but do more exercise to burn calories. This will also lead to a calorie deficit. Conventional wisdom is that you need to burn 3, calories to lose 1 pound.

This means reducing calorie intake by kcal per day to lose 1 pound in a week. In reality, the number of calories you need to burn depends on how much body fat and muscle you have. Foster notes, all of the weight lost comes from a combination of fat and lean tissue, which is mostly muscle. While multiple diet and exercise variables determine how much comes from fat versus muscle, caloric deficits never target fat exclusively. To lose a pound, you need to have a good idea of how many calories you burn use for energy on an average day.

According to the U. Department of Health and Human Services , the average adult woman expends roughly 1, to 2, calories per day, and the average adult man uses 2, to 3, calories per day. The average adult woman is 5 feet 4 inches tall and weighs lbs, while the average man is 5 feet 10 inches tall and weighs lbs.

Yet age, activity level, body size, and body composition all influence how many calories a person burns through each day. To get a more accurate idea of your daily caloric requirements, you can turn to an online metabolic rate calculator. These determine basal metabolic rate BMR , which refers to the number of calories that the body burns every day for energy just to maintain basic biological functions.

When multiplied by an activity factor how much you move in a day , you get your daily metabolic rate, an estimate of how many calories you actually burn in 24 hours — and how many calories you need to eat every day just to keep your weight constant, says Sari Greaves , a registered dietitian nutritionist at LBS Nutrition in East Brunswick, New Jersey, and the author of Cooking Well Healthy Kids. But using such a calculator, while more accurate than calculators that do not take into account your body fat versus lean mass will require that you have a tool like calipers those fat pinchers your doctor may have used on you in the past or a smart scale to estimate your body composition.

Once you know your current daily caloric requirement, you can create your own formula for losing weight. Simply put, as long as you are eating fewer calories than that number, or you increase your daily caloric burn with exercise, you will lose weight, explains Audra Wilson, RD, CSCS, a bariatric dietitian and strength and conditioning specialist at the Northwestern Medicine Metabolic Health and Surgical Weight Loss Center at Delnor Hospital in Geneva, Illinois.

For example, you might eat fewer calories, work off more calories through exercise, or do any combination of the two actions to achieve a deficit of calories. For example, you might choose to eat calories fewer than your daily caloric requirement and then do a workout that burns another calories, she says.

In terms of the 3,calorie rule, that would mean that if you achieve that calorie deficit at the end of each day, you would lose 1 lb of fat in seven days. While the math is complicated, the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, one of the top nutrition research centers in the United States, has created a weight loss predictor to help you more closely estimate how much weight you would lose with a given daily calorie deficit.

It uses mathematical models based on your age, height, weight, and biological sex, as well as the size of your daily caloric deficit. It also provides an estimate of how many calories you need to maintain your body weight and likely are consuming right now. The size of your caloric deficit affects how fast you lose weight, with larger deficits leading to faster weight loss.

Yet experts typically agree that losing 2 lbs per week is the healthiest and most sustainable pace of weight loss , Wilson explains. If you are losing more than that in a given week, it is likely that you are significantly cutting into your lean muscle mass. By lowering your metabolic rate, this sets you up to eventually regain all of the weight you lost, and possibly then some. A study published in January in Nutrients analyzed three commercial diet plans designed to result in rapid weight loss, and authors reported that participants experienced deficiencies in nutrients such as vitamin D , B vitamins, vitamin E , selenium, and zinc.