Ah yes, the wonderful calorie. Revel in its magnificent glory and bow down to its ultimate power. Make certain to never forget that the almighty calorie is the ruler of your dieting domain…

Or is it?

The question of how many calories a person should consume in a typical day is one that has been studied by hundreds, even thousands, of nutritional scientists since the late 1800s. It is a question that, surprisingly, still baffles all but a few dieters to this very day. Such a lengthy period of study surely indicates that no definitive answer has yet emerged, but what can be gleaned from this more than 100-year period of study?

What is a Calorie Anyway?

We could spend a lot of time trying to explain the science behind calories, and bore you with lots of scientific lingo – but we won’t. Instead, let’s define what a calorie is in an easy to understand definition. Simply, calories are units of measure that help us understand the amount of energy a piece of food may yield when digested by the human body. There are certainly much more detailed definitions available, but for our purposes, this will suffice. It’s time to move on to how many calories a typical adult should consume in a single day.

So… How Many Calories?

While certain units of measure, like the speed limit on the street you live, are easy to grasp and apply, calories are much harder to define. How many calories each of us consumes in a day is often a veiled number, one that we pay little to no attention to. That is, until it’s time to lose weight.

Complicating the matter of how many calories a person seeking to lose weight should consume is the fact that every dieter’s body is different. This means that there is no one size fits all figure for the number of calories a person should consume. Rather than attempting to locate this number, an often-used practice is to add up your daily caloric intake for an entire week. Once you have all seven-day’s worth of figures, simply take an average. Subtract 500 calories from your average daily intake, and you are very likely to start losing weight, or at least stop putting it on.

Do the Math

If a person who typically eats 2,500 calories a day deducts 500 calories from this figure, their new diet would consist of 2,000 calories, each day. When you multiply the 500 subtracted calories by seven days, it brings you to a grand total of 3,500 calories that have been removed from your weekly intake. As stated previously, this method is an easy way to control how many calories you consume in a week’s time.

How many calories you consume is important, but it’s not the only factor involved in losing weight. In order to give your body an extra boost of weight shedding power, incorporate exercise into your daily routine. Even moderate physical activity will help boost your weight loss.

Christy Shatlock, Lead Dietitian, MS/RD