Lose A Pound Calculator

I'm a big advocate of gradual weight loss, and I can tell you that losing weight safely and effectively takes time. I would never recommend losing more than 2 to 3 pounds a week - tops. Think about it? For a person of my weight – 118 pounds – to lose one pound in a week I must expend all the calories that make up that pound – about 3,500 calories. So to burn one pound of fat I have to either burn 500-calories every day with physical activity, or I have to cut 500-calories out of my diet every day, for that entire week.

As a personal trainer I see too many people throw in the towel on their weight loss efforts because they expect too much, too fast. Losing weight takes time and effort, so you need to enjoy what you‘re doing.

Determine how many calories you can realistically burn with your favorite activities. For example, an average person can burn 500-calories with 45-mintues of intense cycling, Thai boxing, step aerobics or rock climbing. On the flip side, an average person can cut 500-calories out of their daily diet if they skip that large blueberry muffin with butter, and substitute it with whole grain cereal and skim milk. If you steer clear of that typical late night snack – a 4-ounce-serving of potato chips in front of the television – you can easily cut 500 calories out of your daily diet.

Keeping weight off requires permanent lifestyle changes. If you have a life, like most of us do, you might only squeeze an hour in at the gym, a few times a week. That means the remainder of your weight loss efforts should be concentrated on restricting calories. You have to develop a healthy eating plan combined with a workout program that will help you chop and burn those calories every day of the week. But how many calories do you need to chop and burn?

Our Lose a Pound Calculator can give you a good idea – just enter the pounds you'd like to shed and a realistic number of weeks you want to lose them in. Our handy calculator will estimate the number of calories you must cut out of your daily diet or burn with physical activity to achieve that goal. The average person needs roughly 1,600 to 2,000 calories in a day, so if the calculator estimates a diet with fewer calories than this, chances are the goals you've set are unrealistic.