How to Create a Calorie Deficit

In order to burn fat and lose weight, you must create a calorie deficit – that is, you must take in fewer calories than you need so your body makes withdrawals from its fat reserves. Fat is like your body’s savings account - and while we may not be so good at saving money, your body is a past master when it comes to saving fat.

To create a calorie deficit, you need to know a few things. First, what your body burns daily in terms of calories – called the basal metabolic rate (BMR) – and second, the number of calories you plan to eat daily. Subtract the amount of calories you plan to burn with exercise and you have completed the equation:

Calories Consumed -Basal Metabolic Rate -Calories Burned by Exercise
=Calorie Deficit

Note the word “plan” – you need to plan the activity to burn fat and plan which foods you will eat. Without this, your program will work only sporadically or not at all.

Also note this formula can just as easily product a calorie surplus – what we are trying to avoid.

To find your basal metabolic rate, use this calculation:

For Men:
BMR = 66 + (6.23 x 'your weight in lbs') + (12.7 x 'your height in ins')
- (6.8 x 'your age')

For Women:
BMR = 655 + (4.35 x 'your weight in lbs') + (4.7 x 'your height in ins')
- (4.7 x 'your age')

Here’s a BMR calculator to save time.

Once you have an idea what you need daily to keep your metabolism going, you need to plan your diet and exercise program.

Even though eating a healthy balanced diet high in quality proteins and complex carbohydrates is good, the calorie total still needs to be less than or equal to your BMR plus calories used for daily activity or you won’t lose weight. Eat Big Macs and Baskin Robbins if you want, just make sure you are getting your BMR plus activity or less.

Next up is the exercise program. But which kind of exercise? It’s best to do cardiovascular exercises that involve your leg muscles since they burn the most calories. Resistance training like weights is not a bad idea, but it burns too few calories to be very effective at burning fat A combination of the two may be the best bet, but remember the primary goal is to burn fat and that means burning as many calories as possible.

How much cardio should you do? Depends on your fat loss goal. A pound of fat is 3,500 calories. So if you want to lose a pound a week, you’d need 7 rigorous cardio sessions of 45 minutes to an hour per week – yow! Too hard for most people. You can however, take half that off your diet and get the other half from exercise.

So that would mean 1,750 calories less per week in the food you eat and about 4 cardio sessions of about 40 minutes each – doable, but still hard and you’d need to eat 250 calories less per day which may be even harder than the exercise since you might get pretty hungry.

It is better to go slow at the beginning and go for a modest 2 pounds of fat per month. That’s 7,000 calories – you can get that all from vigorous cardio and minor diet changes. You’d need about 12 sessions of 45 minutes or 3 per week plus cut desserts, saturated fats and simple carbs down to a minimum.

If you do a combination of resistance training and cardio you may not notice much weight loss at first since you will be gaining muscle weight – this is true even when doing only cardio. But eventually, your weight – and more importantly – your body fat, should drop off gradually and in a completely healthy, non- stressful way.

There are three reasons why most programs fail: First and foremost is that people don’t do them long enough to have a noticeable effect. You need two or even three months to start noticing any real difference. You should feel healthier sooner and have a bit more energy, but the fat loss takes a bit to kick in. Since the fat loss will occur from all over you body, the change will be very gradual and hardly noticeable at first.

This should be a lifestyle change, not something to do until you lose a few pounds then back to business as usual.

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