The daily calorie requirement is made up of several factors. These are: gender, age, height, weight and physical activity. The combination of these factors determines the individual calorie requirement. Thus, all these factors should be taken into account if you want to achieve an accurate calculation.
To make this easier, you can use a calorie calculator. We recommend the calorie calculator from https://www.rockanutrition.de/pages/kalorienrechner.
Also, apps such as MyFitnessPal, Lifesum, YAZIO, FatSecret or Noom Coach can be used.
If you want to calculate your daily needs yourself, you can use the following formula:
Calculating Calorie Requirement: How to Calculate Your Basal Metabolic Rate
About 100 years ago, J. A. Harris and F. G. Benedict developed a mathematical formula to calculate the daily basal metabolic rate (the amount of calories the body needs to maintain or perform its functions). This so-called Harris-Benedict formula is still in use today. It takes into account important factors such as age, height, weight and gender.
The formula is the following:
655.1 + (9.6 * body weight in kg) + (1.8 * height in cm) - (4.7 * age in years)
As an example, we will take a 40 year old woman. Let us assume that she weighs 80 kg and is 170 cm tall. The calculation would look like this:
655.1 + (9.6 * 80 kg) + (1.8 * 170 cm) - (4.7 * 40 years)
The next step is as follows:
655,1 + 768 + 306 – 188
In this case, this leads to the result: 1541 kcal per day (This is the basic requirement, in other words the calories needed for the body functions)
By the way: Men have to use a different formula:
66.47 + (13.7 * body weight in kg) + (5 * height in cm) - (6.8 * age in years)
However, that is not all. In addition to the basic needs the activity level also has to be considered. Because the total calories required daily are made up of the basal metabolic rate and the activity metabolic rate (activity level). How to calculate this is explained in the next section.
PAL factor for more calories per day
The calculation of total calories also includes the so-called PAL factor (Physical Activity Level), which indicates how active you are during the day. Since hardly any energy is consumed when sleeping, the PAL value in this case is 0.95. This value is multiplied by the calculated basal metabolic rate at the end.
If the 40-year-old woman from our example sleeps around the clock, the calculation would look as follows:
1541 kcal (basal metabolic rate) x 0.95 (PAL value for sleeping) = 1463 kcal (This gives the total metabolic rate).
Conclusion: People who sleep around the clock need less calories, as you can see. This only is an example to illustrate how the consumption is calculated. In the following table, different physical strains are shown with their PAL value. Depending on the individual physical activity, the corresponding value can be used to calculate the total daily consumption.
In the example of the 40-year-old woman, we assume that she sleeps 1/3 of the day, works 1/3 of the day as a saleswoman and spends her free time, the last third of the day in front of the computer. In this a case, we calculate the average daily PAL factor:
0.95 (sleep) + 1.8 (shop assistant) + 1.4 (mainly sedentary work) : 3
This gives an average PAL factor of 1.4. Since the total number of calories needed for the day is made up of the basal metabolic rate and the energy usage and since we have already calculated the basal metabolic rate, we now take this and multiply it with the energy usage. For our example, this results in a total calorie requirement of:
1541 kcal (basic requirement) x 1.4 (PAL factor) = 2131 kcal.
Summary
The result shows that the 40-year-old woman should consume 2131 calories a day to maintain her weight. If she eats less, she will lose weight. In the opposite case, i.e. if she consumes more than the required amount, she gains weight. If you do not want to gain or lose weight, you should not consume more or less calories than you need. People who want to lose weight are recommended to consume 400 - 600 calories less than their individual total metabolic rate. It goes without saying that sufficient exercise should be built into everyday life to melt away pounds. To achieve this, you can do sports or housework because the calorie requirement during sports is very high and can therefore help you lose weight. Even the calorie consumption during housework is impressively high.
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