Burn 500 Calories A Day - Lose A Pound A Week

Do you know how to balance your calories? Weight loss begins with knowing what foods to eat and in what amounts, depending on your specific calorie requirements.

The most important thing you need to know about calories and weight loss is that you need to burn an additional 500 calories per day to lose a pound in one week. This is based on how many calories you burn while doing your daily activities. You can do this by exercising or dieting, but ideally you should do a combination of both.

First, a little explanation. An inactive or lightly active man weighing 150 pounds, will burn roughly 2000 calories each day. If he weighed 200 pounds, he would burn around 2300 calories each day. On the other hand, a 150-pound woman will burn about 1700 calories a day.

Why do men and women of the same weight burn different calories? Most of it has to do with the fact that men have more muscle mass which allows them to burn more calories at rest. Another reason to encourage you to put on muscle, whether you are a man or a woman.

So, going back to calories and weight loss… if you are a 150-pound woman and you don’t want to do any exercise, you need to eat no more than 1200 calories a day.

However, if you are willing to put in some work, you can eat a little bit more, provided you engage in more calorie-burning activities. For instance, housework can make you burn calories. Heavy cleaning burns 432 calories an hour. Do that for 70 minutes a day and you will have 500 calories burnt. Mowing the lawn for an hour with a push mower burns 324 calories. But there are fun ways to burn calories too. An hour of singles tennis burns 549 calories an hour. And, an hour of skiing burns a whopping 740 calories.

If you are serious about controlling calories, weight loss will follow. One way to do this is to control your portion sizes. Meals, both at home and at restaurants have been growing in size for decades. For instance, in the 1930s, the average dinner plate size had an 8 or 9 inch diameter. Now, the average diameter is 10 to 12 inches. Switch to salad plates for dinner and watch the pounds disappear.

It is no secret that restaurant portions have grown. For instance at Romano?s Macaroni Grill, a seemingly good for you Teriyaki Salmon dinner has a whopping 1240 calories. If you are eating out, either split the meal with someone else or ask for a take home box at the start of the meal. Then, place half of the food in the take home box before you start eating. That way you can still clean your plate without taking on the additional calories.

The calories weight loss formula is simply balancing calories-in and calories-out. The magic number is 500 calories burned off or reduced from your food intake. To lose a pound a week, all you need to do is get rid of those extra 500 calories per day.