The first thing you need to know is that calories are a measure of thermogenic (heat) energy. Every action your body engages in results in the use of this energy. This includes everything from exercising, food digestion, organ function, and even sleeping.

The amount of calories specified in a food is really a measure of how much thermogenic energy it would take to completely burn through that food. Your body burns through what you eat as you use energy. When your body runs out of food to burn for fuel, it will tap into stored body fat primarily and burn that in order to meet your energy needs.

Any food that doesn’t get burned for energy is stored in the body for use at a later time.

This is the caloric intake level that serves as your baseline where you’re not in a deficit, or a surplus. Think of it as a map marker that shows your currently location.

Knowing this number requires you to know your basal metabolic rate (BMR), which is the amount of calories you burn without any physical activity. Another way to think of this is the amount of caloric burn it takes to sustain basic bodily function.

This number can be determined by pluging your age, height, and weight into a BMR calculator.

*Consistently eating below your BMR for too long can produce some pretty negative effects on your hormonal stability and metabolism, so I generally advise against it.

• A workout that lasts 45-60 minutes can burn 300-400 calories
• An hour of walking can burn 200-300 calories.
• Non exercise activity can result in an additional caloric burn of around 200 calories.

If your BMR is 1500 and you were to workout for an hour, walk for an hour along with all the non exercise activity, you’d reach a total burn of 2200-2400 calories for the day.

This is where you eat less than what you burn. Eating in a deficit over a period of weeks is mainly how you’d reach your fat loss goal.

1 pound of fat is equal to 3500 calories. Maintaining a deficit of 500 calories over a 7 day period would result in a total of 3500 calories burned from fat, reducing your body fat by 1 pound.

A steeper calorie deficit can speed up the fat loss process, but maintaining a calorie deficit that is too steep for too long can backfire, causing increased fat retention by slowing down your metabolism, and destabilizing your hormonal function.

The best thing to do is be patient with the process and prioritize health and sustainability.

This is where you eat more than what you burn. The purpose of doing is to create an abundance of energy in reserve in order facilitate high training performance and recovery.

Muscle building is very energy intensive not only because the training is challenging, but also because your body uses more energy in the process of building new muscle tissue.

Not only do you need more food for this process, but you also need more rest. Not getting enough rest while being in a calorie surplus can cause muscle loss and fat gain, so you need both. Going to bed between 8-10pm and waking between 5-7am is an ideal sleep schedule.

Your calorie surplus only needs about 10%, or about 150-200 calories extra per day. This surplus is high enough to build muscle, but not high enough to cause any significant increase in body fat.

If you gain a pound of fat in a week, you’re surplus is too high.

Muscle building takes a much longer time than fat loss, so if your goal is to gain muscle mass, the ideal amount of time to commit to this goal is 10-12 months at a time.

Males can expect to gain 1-1.5lbs of muscle per month.

Females can expect to gain 0.5-1lb of muscle per month.

A great tool for tracking your daily caloric burn and sleep quality is by wearing a smart watch like a fitbit. I personally wear a fitbit because it provides all kinds of data.

• How many calories I burn daily/weekly.
• How many hours of light, deep, and REM sleep I get each night.
• Resting heartrate, peak heartrate, etc.

It’s an ideal tool for anyone who’s serious about their fitness goals.

For diet tracking, my top recommendations are 2 mobile apps.

1. My Fitness Pal
2. Cronometer

My Fitness Pal is free to use and very simple. All you need to do is download it onto your device of choice and create an account. With tracking your food, you can type in the name of the food you’re logging, or you can scan the barcode on the packaging. Then just add the quantity and you’re done.

You can calculate your daily caloric requirement through the app as well with the goal setting option. Just plug in your age, height, weight, and activity level. It’ll give you your numbers based on your body mass index (BMI).

Cronometer works practically the same way, but there’s a bit of a trade off. The grocery database is not as large as the one My Fitness Pal uses, but it gives you a full breakdown of all vitamins, minerals, amino acids, and omega fatty acid quantities of each food you log. This is great for anyone who wants those kinds of details. Cronometer costs a small one time fee to use which around 2 or 3 dollars.