having food plans or meticulously tracking everything you have isn't a great long term strategy for a lot of people, as it doesn’t allow for flexibility in certain situations and can require high amounts of effort.

Of course it can be a brilliant tool for most though and I believe that spending a sustained period of time tracking food, planning meals and working toward specific calories and macronutrient goals can actually help you move toward a more intuitive way of eating which is long term the most viable approach.

There are a few ways that I people can calculate their calorie and macronutrient targets…

The first and by far the easiest way is to simply search for a calorie calculator on the internet, as there are loads and they all pretty much do the same job, you will be required to punch in some information about your height, weight, age, activity level and it will give you a start point to aim for regarding your calories.

Some of the best online calorie calculators are:

Calorie calculator

Precision Nutrition calculator

TDEE Calculator

If however I was working it out by hand, I would do the following… For this example I will use an 80kg person wanting to lose weight.

Step 1. Take your bodyweight in lbs and add a zero to it.

E.g. 80kg x 2.2 = 176lbs… add the zero = 1760

This is a number we call your approximate BASAL METABOLIC RATE (BMR), this is the amount of energy needed to fuel essential processes in the body such as respiration, circulation and just general growth and repair. So this number is the number of calories it would take to maintain our weight without moving.

Step 2. We need to factor in any calories we burn throughout the day through movement and activity.

We do this by multiplying your basal metabolic rate by a number depending upon how active you are...

BMR x 1.1 - If someone has a very sedentary lifestyle, i.e. has a desk job, isn't required to walk about or move much and spends a lot of time in a seated position.

BMR x 1.3 - If someone was lightly active, for example did a moderate amount of walking throughout the day but no intense exercise.

BMR x 1.5 - If someone was moderately active, i.e. they did a moderate amount of walking/moving throughout the day and exercised at a moderate intensity 3x per week.

BMR x 1.7 - If someone was very active, i.e. exercised intensely multiple times per week and was very active throughout the day.

BMR x 1.9 - Iif someone was extremely active, i.e. had a manual labour job and exercised regularly.

For our example I'm going to multiply our 80kg person's BMR of 1760kcal by 1.3 as they are lightly active... this gives us a total of 2,288kcal... in theory this should be the number of calories it takes to maintain this person's weight factoring in the amount of activity + exercise they do, therefore we shall call it their MAINTENANCE CALORIES.

Step 3. Create a calorie deficit.

A good rule of thumb for creating a calorie deficit is to reduce their maintenance calories by 10-15%.

For our example, our 2,288kcal minus 10% is 2,059kcal as a daily average… and for ease sake, I’ll round down to 2,000kcal

Step 4. Calculate your protein requirements.

The current literature recommends that we consume between 1.6 - 2.2g of protein per kilogram of bodyweight. I normally recommend a figure somewhere in between and say 2g per kg.

For our example our 80kg person would aim for 160g of protein each day.

Step 5. Don’t worry about the rest.

We could get really geeky here and give you exact fat and carb targets... however unless we're at an elite level of performance this just doesn't really matter that much and is much more down to personal preference. Some days you may prefer a more carb heavy approach and others may favour a higher fat approach. Most likely people will want a bit of freedom to do either depending upon what they fancy that day.

What is however important is that we stay rigid around keeping our calories in check, keep our activity levels constant and that we hit our protein target... the rest is flexible and largely down to personal preference.

Therefore our 80kg person in the example would focus on getting their intake from a wide variety of foods that they enjoy whilst sticking at 2,000kcal and getting 160g of protein each day and eating plenty of fruits and vegetables and the rest doesn't really matter.

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