Calories are the fuel that the body gets from food. They are necessary for all life processes: breathing, heart function, movement, even sleep. To maintain weight, lose weight or gain weight, it is important to understand how much energy you need. Each person is individual, and the daily caloric intake depends on many factors: age, height, weight, lifestyle and level of physical activity. Knowing your norm, you can not only achieve the desired shape, but also maintain health.
The first thing the calculation starts with is determining the body’s basic energy requirement at rest. Simply put, how many calories your body spends just to live: breathe, digest food, maintain body temperature. This value can be found using special formulas or online calculators. Usually, it is enough to enter your weight, height, age and gender – and you will get an approximate figure. This is the basic starting point, which we then adjust to your lifestyle.
The next step is to take into account your physical activity. If you spend most of the day at the computer and hardly move, your body needs fewer calories. If you exercise regularly, walk a lot, or do physical work, your body needs more. It is your lifestyle that makes the calculation individual. Calculators usually offer to select an activity level to adjust the final figure. There is no need to strive for perfect accuracy – a rough understanding of how much energy you spend daily is enough.
When you know your daily requirement, you can adapt your diet to your goal. If you want to lose weight, you need to create a small calorie deficit – get a little less from food than you spend. But without drastic restrictions: a strong deficit can slow down your metabolism and harm your health. If you want to gain weight or muscle mass, on the contrary, your body will need a little more energy than usual. The main thing is to do this gradually and in a balanced way, monitoring the quality of your diet, and not just the numbers.
It is important to understand: counting calories is not a strict restriction, but a tool for conscious eating. It helps you better understand how much energy you receive and spend, which foods satiate, and which provide “empty” calories. Over time, you will begin to navigate intuitively and will be able to eat without constant monitoring. But even a basic understanding of your norm already gives an important advantage: you control your nutrition, and not your nutrition controls you.
