Calories Needed

Before we can begin to assess our diet and find ways of losing weight, gaining weight, or maintaining a healthy weight we must first recognise how many calories per day we need to fuel our bodies.

The guidelines below are designed to help you maintain your weight. For a weight loss of 1lb per week you would need to cut back by 500 calories a day. If you want to lose weight it is very important to monitor the fat content of your meals, see our nutrition page.

WOMEN	AVERAGE 2300 (weighing around 10 stone)
MEN	AVERAGE 3000 (weighing around 11.5 stone)

The lighter you are the less calories you need. Also take into consideration your level of activity. If you do a lot of exercise, our have a job that is very active, like a waitress or a builder you will need more energy. If you work in an office you require less. We need more calories when we are younger and less as we get older.

Here are some samples of how you might use up your daily calories:

SAMPLE ONE		SAMPLE TWO
Bowl fruit and fibre, skimmed milk	200	Bacon on Toast	400
Packet Crisps	130	Packet Crisps	130
Cup Soup	70	Bar Chocolate	200
Cheese and Coleslaw Sandwich	300	8 pints lager	1600
Apple	60	Kebab and chips	1000
Portion Roast Chicken	160	DAY'S TOTAL	3330
Mashed Potato	180
Peas	80
Boiled Carrots	15
Gooseberry Fool	200
Fruit Salad	120
2 large glasses white wine	300
Packet of salted nuts	250
DAY'S TOTAL	2065

You can see from these two examples how we can get our daily calorie requirement in differing ways! We all have bad days where we eat greasy food and drink too much, but try and make this less often and to eat a healthy balanced diet, such as sample one, at least most days. If you are careful most of the time you can get away with having a a bit of a treat, perhaps on the weekend!
If you are dieting it may help you to make a chart like this everyday, and look for ways to cut back on calories, for example here you could save 580 simply buy not having nuts in the evening and skipping the fool and bag of crisps. You still would be left with enough food to satisfy your hunger. To help you, you could buy a little Calorie Counter book from our Calorie Counter Guides page, to check values of foods you're unsure of.