Deciding your daily calorie intake plays a big role in how effectively you lose weight. If you eat too many calories, you will not lose weight. If you eat too little, your body’s metabolism will slow down, and as a result, it will try to retain more calories than it takes in.

To decide how many calories you will consume each day, it is best to start with your Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR). As a reminder, your BMR is the minimum amount of dietary energy you need to digest to preserve your current state if you were to lie still all day.

Given this fact, any movement you make, no matter how small, will result in fat burning. Of course, this is exactly what you need to do to lose weight. Also, when you include any type of exercise in your daily activities, the faster you will burn fat.

Why use your BMR?

Some might think that it is not necessary to use your basal metabolic rate as a guide to control your daily calories. It’s just as easy to limit yourself to 1,200 to 1,500 calories a day. This would be fine if we were all the same. However, this one-size-fits-all diet mentality may work for some, but for most they will need something else that is more suited to their lifestyle.

For example, the BMR for a 5-foot-5 woman in 25 years who weighs 170 pounds is 1,582 calories. However, for a man of the same height and weight, his BMR is 1780 calories. So if they both went on a diet eating only 1500 calories a day, the man should lose more weight as he is further away from his BMR.

So by using your BMR, you can get a better estimate of how many calories you need to eat each day to lose weight, which helps take the guesswork out of deciding how many calories to eat. Furthermore, you can also use it as a guide to determine how fast to lose weight.

Should Your Daily Caloric Intake Stay At Your BMR?

Since consuming the calories derived from your BMR will allow you to lose weight, it is a good place to start your diet. However, you can go below your BMR calorie intake to burn fat faster. The only precaution you need to take is to make sure you don’t let your body go into starvation mode.

Since everyone’s metabolism is different, there is no set point at which you know for sure that you are in starvation mode. However, it is generally accepted that as long as you consume at least 1,200 calories a day, you should be fine.

After you’ve spent a week dieting on your BMR, you can assess your weight to see if you need to add calories to slow down or subtract calories to lose faster.

Also, since your BMR changes with your weight, the value you get in a month will be different from the value you get today, if during that time you lost, say, 10 pounds. By taking this changing value into account, you can adjust your calorie intake accordingly and avoid entering a weight loss plateau.

Calculate your basal metabolic rate

To calculate your BMR to monitor your daily calories, you can use this BMR calculator. However, remember that this is only a guide to determining your calorie intake. After a week, evaluate your progress and make any necessary changes.