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How Many Calories Are Required Daily?

Look on any nutrition label and you'll find that the average daily caloric intake is listed at 2,000 calories for women and 2,500 calories for men. While these are nice estimates for the general population, in reality, the amount of your calories that your body needs each day may vary from 1,500 to 3,000 calories, depending on your age, weight and activity level.

  1. Elements

    • A calorie is a measure of energy. The calories in foods come from fats, proteins and carbohydrates. A gram of protein or carbohydrates contains 4 calories. A gram of fat, however, contains 9 calories. The body needs all three to perform each and every function. Even the most basic function, sleeping, requires calories, albeit not many. As energy output increases, so does the amount of calories used. There are three factors to consider when calculating the amount of calories your body needs.

    Basal Metabolic Rate

    • Even resting, your body has a minimum requirement of energy that it needs to keep the heart beating, lungs breathing and blood pumping. This is called your basal metabolic rate (BMR). Your BMR may be responsible for burning up to 70 percent of your total caloric expenditure. For a 150-pound woman who, on average, needs about 2,080 calories per day, this would be 1,456 calories used. BMR is determined by a number of factors, including genetics, gender (men typically have a higher rate), weight (the more you weigh, the higher your BMR will be) and age (BMR decreases with age).

    Activity Level

    • Your activity level will account for about 20 percent of calories burned each day or about 416 calories for a 150-pound woman. The more vigorous or intense the activity is, the higher the amount of calories burned. A 150-pound woman who walks for one hour at 3 mph will burn about 300 calories. That same woman running at 6 mph for the same duration would burn about 680 calories.

    Thermic Effect of Food

    • The thermic effect of food is the energy expended to consume food through biting, chewing, swallowing and processing the food. It may account for about 10 percent of calories used each day. Food calories require different amounts of energy to process them, with proteins requiring the most energy. Fat requires the least amount of energy, and should comprise the smallest percentage of food calories consumed (no more than 30 percent).

    Dieting and Weight Loss

    • If you are looking to lose weight, you must burn more calories than you consume. There are two ways to achieve that goal: by consuming fewer calories than your body burns or by increasing the amount of calories your body burns (while maintaining the same diet). The best way to ensure that you are decreasing the calories consumed is by understanding the amount of calories contained in the foods you eat. Compare what you eat, and how much of it, against a food calorie calculator (see resources) to determine how best to decrease your calorie intake.

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