Welcome back #fitfam! We are in the early stages of summer and this is the perfect time to make tweaks to our exercise regimens, diets, and to calibrate our focus based on life change such as kids being home from school and even changes to our commute to and from work. The smallest changes can make a world of difference and today we will explore the impact of calories on weight maintenance to include losses, gains, and leveling. We’ll use our time this week to explore how to burn calories effectively and use a surplus or deficit to your advantage.
Let’s get started with how calories impact your diet. The first place to start is with your smart watch or fitness tracker and begin to understand that the numbers on your tracker are not an exact measurement of how many steps or calories you have actually burned in a given day. This information is always considered more of a ballpark figure due to factors such as the distance of your steps, for example 2 feet between steps versus 2.5 feet between steps. The numbers you see will often reflect a general range of activity in a day and can assist you in setting an average. The step range will then estimate the calories burned strictly based on those steps. Here’s the rub, you will literally burn calories doing anything including brushing your teeth, washing your face, or even laughing. Which brings us to total calories burned and how that number impacts your waistline.
In an average day of moderate activity, an adult male or female can burn anywhere from 1600-2000 calories without actually working out. If you were to add around 300-500 calories burned during a focused workout, then you could elevate that total to 1900-2500 calories in a day. Based on your goal, weight gain or weight loss, the amount of calories you consume will place you into a surplus or deficit. During my training program, to get into the proper weight class for competitive boxing, I needed to work into a deficit. What I already knew is that I burned 2700 calories per day at a minimum, so I understood that if I consumed 2000 calories or less per day, I could safely lose weight while consuming the necessary amount of food that I could convert to energy and not burn out.
Once I reached my weight goal, I needed to adjust to maintain my weight or gain as little as possible before cutting to the exact weight at my weigh-in. It was as simple as adding around 200-300 calories per day while also lifting more light weights to maintain my strength while not get bigger.
My advice to my readers is to decide what your goal is and be prepared to tweak and the process along the way!
If you are interested in following along with my journey or contacting my company, I can be found on social media platforms:
Website – Total Camo Fitness
Facebook – Total Camo Fitness
YouTube – Total Camo Fitness
Great information! I’m lucky to be a pretty good weight, but I think understanding how calories work is so important in maintaining a healthy weight.
Health and wellness is such an in depth area of life. I really enjoy learning the details of how the different elements work.
This is interesting, would love to check your camo fitness
Hi Jeannie, I have a good bit of info on my website but also have a 30 day challenge coming up from June 15th to July 15th. The site is http://www.totalcamofitness.com
This is really good information ! Thank you for sharing
Hey Jordan, thank you for reading!
All of this. So great.
Thanks Krissy! My goal is to provide useful and accurate information to our readers while building an awesome fitness community.
Very interesting post! 🙂
I hope that you also find the information useful!
Right now it’s coming back into shape and the rhythm of working out that’s important to me. Been lacking off on walking NY body now feels like we playing hahah. So definitely appreciated the information you’ve included hrre
There’s such an ebb and flow with health and wellness, I can definitely relate to slacking off and having to pick things back up.
I agree! It’s all about the goal, either weight loss or weight gain. Then work in your program. Thanks for sharing.
Hi Christine, thank you for reading!
This is great! It helped me better understand how the calorie and step tracker works. And I agree with you to set a fitness goal and make a plan to reach it.
High Nury, setting a fitness goal is so important, otherwise we end up aimlessly trying things that are hard to maintain or don’t help us achieve tangible results.
Thanks for this post! I am currently writing a blog post on how to lose weight after pregnancy and dropped a link to this post in there.
I love your explanation of it, I feel like it’s clear and concise and figured it would be helpful to my audience.
Best wishes, Curatedbynoelle
Hi Noelle, thank you for reading and sharing, hopefully your readers find it useful. Your blog looks very nice and informative. It has awesome curb appeal too!
Aww thank you so much! 🙂 I can include a link to the post if you’d like?
Yes, please share it with us!