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When it comes to losing weight, changing your body composition, or even maintaining your current weight, understanding calories is crucial to your success.

It seems like simple math, if your goal is to lose fat, you must have a caloric deficit; you must burn more than you consume. But there is more to it than just cutting calories to burn fat. Your body is a work of mastery that is constantly responding and adapting to everything you do. If you begin to skip meals, refuse to eat all day, or even worse, starve yourself your body assumes there is a shortage of food. It begins to slow down all it’s processes and the food you do eat is stored it as fat.

That’s where understanding your daily caloric needs and the caloric content of foods comes in. I am not suggesting you count calories for each meal, each snack, and every single bite of food you have. No, you don’t have to cound every calorie. But you do have to gain an understanding of the different components that effect your ability to lose fat, and calories is one of those components.

The first step you should take is to learn how many calories you should eat each day. There are a two steps to learning how many calories you need each day, first is learning your BMR (explained in previous post). Second is learning how much activity you do throughout the day. The activity you perform througout the day is added to your BMR to get an estimated total number of calories required. If you would like to learn how many calories you need each day, click here.

The second step you should take is to educate yourself on the calories contained in the various foods you eat. Although I personally do not count every calorie I eat for each meal, I do have calorie strategies in place. I’ve been paying attention & educating myself about the number of calories contained in various foods for a long time now and it really helps me. For example, I know about how many calories are in a medium apple, my favorite granola bar, & a tablespoon of peanut butter (one of my weaknesses, I’ve been caught eating pb out of the jar numerous times!). Since I remember this information, I can estimate how much food I should eat each day, each snack, each meal.

If you don’t know anything about calories, consider taking a few weeks to keep a food log. In the food log you can record what you eat, how often you eat, and how much you eat. At the end of each day count up how many calories you’ve eaten. If you would like to know how many calories are in various foods, you can sign up for a free account by clicking here. This is a free online resource that I have used in the past. (I haven’t gotten any spam from them I don’t think)

You can also learn about the calories contained in various foods by reading the labels. You’ll begin to see that things like peanut butter, butter, & oils are mostly fat and are very high in calories. It doesn’t mean you should not eat high calorie foods, but once you know this you can begin to adjust the portion size based on your personal caloric needs.

The third step you can take is to learn how many calories are burned when you perform various activities throughout the day. I’ve provided a free tool for you to use, access it by clicking here. This tool will help you make the best choices you can for your workouts and liesure activities.

Every step you take towards your goals is a positive step. Educating yourself and understanding the basics of how your body works is a major positive step you can take by learning a few new nutrition facts each day. Calories are an important part of losing weight and reaching your goals. I encourage you to learn something about calories each day (even if it’s just a little fact). Start from where you are and challenge yourself to gain knowledge and experience each and everyday!