How to properly use Guideline Daily Amounts for determining my calorie consumption?

Question

I'm 5 feet 11 and I weight 189 pounds, I'm trying to lose some weight to reach 176 pounds but I'm failing to lose weight using the Fat Secret weight diary. (I use the metric system and my weight is 86 Kg, I'm 1,82 meters tall)

I calculated my GDA (Guideline Daily Amounts) with 2500 kcal, but although I'm not filling them entirely every day (I'm always at 40-50% of it), my weight is swinging around 86 kgs.

Should I lower the percentage again or the GDA is just plain wrong?

Answer 1

The simple fact is this: If you are not losing weight, you are not in caloric deficit.

It is as simple as that. Usually, the problems are:

• You are not putting everything you eat into the program
• You are underestimate the energy in what you eat
• You have overestimated how much you actually move around every day

Often a combination of all the above.

There are a couple of ways to come around this. Firstly, in my experience there is no way to have long term weight loss without continous effort to keep yourself in caloric deficit. You will automatically start eating larger portions if you don't monitor what you eat.

If you have a sort of stable eating habbit, where you eat more or less the same every day, you can just try removing something from your usual meal. I for example ate bread to every meal, by removing it I more or less cut back 200 kcal. By removing other such things from my diet I managed to put myself in caloric deficit without weighing a thing.

Mostly though, the easiest way to remove all sort of biases is to simply weight everything you eat. This takes a lot of dedication, but it is a sure way of knowing exactly what is wrong with your diet. It makes it a lot easier to diagnose a meal plan. After a while you get a feel on how much you should eat and you only weight your food if you come to a sticky point.

Whether you burn 1800, 2000, 2600 or any other calories per day is quite irrelevant. Just cut back on your calories until you lose weight and take it from there.

Answer 2

You can also use a weight maintenance calculator to determine how many calories you need to consume each day to achieve you goal weight.

Use the following calculator (enter your goal weight instead of your current weight):

http://www.caloriecontrol.org/healthy-weight-tool-kit/weight-maintenance-calculator-men

If you want dramatic results fast, eat less than the amount needed to maintain your goal weight. Or, eat the number of calories required to maintain your goal weight but exercise more.

Please note though: you should never eat less than 1200 calories a day. And if you need exercise inspiration but are short on time, check out Wello.