Low-Carb Diets and Counting Calories

Each person has their own personal recommended calorie intake. We all have different energy needs, and your daily calorie requirement is determined by three main factors:

• Your weight
• The amount of muscle you have
• Your activity levels

To lose 1 lb of body weight, you need to under-eat by 3,500 calories. Obviously you can’t do that in a day, but over the course of a week, it means cutting your daily intake by 500 calories – an achievable amount for most of us. If you have a lot of weight to lose (especially if you’re currently over-eating and gaining weight), you could cut back by 1,000 calories per day and lose 2 lbs a week.

Low-Carb Diets can Help

Although diets vary in their recommendations, as a general rule, a low carb diet is synonymous with a high-fat and moderate protein diet. Those on a low carb diet should get at least 60 to 70 percent of their daily calorie intake from fat. Carbohydrates should make up less than 10 percent, and in some cases, less than 5 percent of daily calorie intake.

If you cut carbs modestly, you cut calories, and you'll lose weight. The message is: Calories count. If you want to lose weight, you have to decrease your food intake or increase your physical activity. It helps to know that carbohydrates make it more difficult to reduce food intake. So cutting the carbohydrates, at least to some extent, will help keep down the caloric intake. With fewer carbohydrates, you're going to eat fewer total calories a day, explains Guenther Boden at Temple University School of Medicine, in an article for the Annals of Internal Medicine.

 

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