The calorie target - inductive or empirical?
If you believe me - in that the way to lose weight is to burn more calories than you eat (forgetting about those efficiency overheads of course!) - then you really need to think about 2 things: how many calories you need to eat each day to stay the same weight, and how fast you want to lose weight.
Let's look at the first part of that: how many calories a day do you need to stay the same weight? Well, that's going to be different for each of us. And that's where two difference research philosophies come in: induction reasoning and empiricism.
What we can strip these two philosophies down to is this: do you come up with that daily calorie number using information, equations and assumptions that are already known, or do you work it out for yourself.
Calculating your daily calorie needs inductively
The inductive approach is easy. You can start with the very ballpark guidelines of 2500 calories a day for a man and 2000 for a woman. It's a great starting point, but chances are those numbers aren't quite right for everyone. I've not performed a study myself, but I wager the numbers are going to be different if you're desk-bound, 5' 4" and 130 lbs, than if you are 6' 2", 240 lbs and work on a construction site carrying bricks around all day.
Just a hunch.
That said, if you would say you were 'about average' in terms of build and lifestyle, you get make a start based on those numbers, but if you think you're not, or you want to be a bit more 'accurate', then it's time to hit the online calculators.
If you query your search engine of choice for 'TDEE calculator', you'll probably get a few results. Some of them may use a different formula, and some of them may produce a result that's a better fit for you. I would recommend trying a few and taking an average. When I tried it, I received a range of values from around 2200 to 2500 calories a day.
And there's your starting point.
Calculating your calories to make Karl Popper proud
Of course, as a follower of empirical science, I'm much more of a fan of knowledge coming through experience and being based on deductive reasoning, so how do we do that? Simple, we do an experiment. We'll strip the design of this back a bit though, we're not going to be submitting it to a journal for peer review...
Choose your reference weigh-in time for a once a week update and pick a number of calories, possibly based around what your eating each day as it is and times it by seven to work out your weekly calorie budget.
Eat that number of calories in the next week and weigh yourself; if you weight went up, reduce it for next week, if it went down, but you were hungry all the time, you could maybe increase it. Work out your budget for the next week and repeat.
And repeat, and repeat, and repeat. If you then plot a graph of your weekly calories against your weekly weight change, you'll be able to see (approximately) the number of calories that should give you a weight change of zero. I've thrown together a quick example of how it might look with a quick plot of some made-up numbers in Excel.
Other spreadsheets are available.
Of course, you may have noticed the obvious downside of this: time. To get a good few data points you're looking at a good few weeks. Possibly not the greatest.
Combining induction and deduction
So what to do? Well, just adopt the best of both worlds. Use the inductive method to get your rough starting point, weigh in, then start recording the weekly calories and adjust as required. Easy.
Now to the next part, working out what the daily target number should be to lose weight, and that just comes down to balancing how quickly you want to lose weight, with how hungry you can cope with being.
As a rule of thumb - and there are a few average and assumptions that go into this, but it does the job for our purposes - a pound of fat is about 3500 calories. If you search for that, you'll no doubt come across lots of things saying that it isn't and that reducing your calories by 500 a day to lose a pound a week is a myth. Ignore them. For our purposes that works fine.
Yes, longer term there are more things we might need to think about - the main one being that as we lose weight, there's less of us to maintain, so our daily energy requirement goes down, but you're going to be following how much you eat and how much weight you lose, so you'll always be on top of that.
So, starting out, if you want to lose a pound a week, you need to reduce the number you've come up with by 500 calories. There are two ways to do this: eat less, and/or exercise more to the equivalent. Again, there are lots of exercise calorie calculators out there, so take a look at a few and find out what you need to do.
The ones I've looked at I've always thought were a bit generous, so I usually take an average of a few and round down and that seems to work for me. The graph is still heading in the right direction. For me at least - male, 5' 10", 161 pounds, I count brisk walking for an hour as 250 calories.
Coming up with my number
I started with the 2500 a day guideline number and just used that - given my averageness. Of course, I'm keeping notes of the calorie intake and monitoring my weight change, so I'm covered empirically as well and can adjust when things start to slow down.
By using that number, then rounding my calories up as I eat and not deducting the exercise as I go, I'm probably about 500 calories short of that (I reckon 250 calories a day in extra exercise and 250 in calorie over-estimation is close enough), and that seems to fit with my losses of a pound a week.
Now, as I mentioned earlier, you'll find lots of things on the internet that say the 3500 calories thing is nonsense, things about starvation mode, even some things that say exercise uses up so few calories it's not even worrying about, so why listen to me?
Put simply, because I have no vested interests, I'm not selling anything and, as far as I've found so far, I'm the only one saying what I eat and telling you week-by-week how much weight I'm losing.
And, if you want to, you can do the same.
Day 41 - 4900 calories
Breakfast
Milk (200)
Weetabix (150)
Lunch
2x sausage sandwich (700)
Snack
Chicken sandwich (300)
Dinner
Curry, rice and naan bread (1000)
4x beers (800)
Bread and butter puddings and cream (1000)
Snack
Bread, butter & jam (200)
4x cereal bars (550)
Exercise
30m walking
Day 42 - 1000 calories
Breakfast
Milk (100)
Lunch
Ham sandwich (200)
Ham sandwich (150)
Dinner
Chicken sandwich (300)
Plum (50)
Beer (200)
Exercise
Walking 70m
Day 43 - 2400 calories
Breakfast
Milk (100)
Snack
Water biscuits (200)
Cheese (100)
Lunch
Chicken & lentil curry with rice (400)
Dinner
Chicken & lentil curry with rice (400)
Snack
Chocolate cake (1000)
Beer (200)
Exercise
Walking 60m
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