Your Numbers Are Off
Not everyone is a calorie counter, but if you are, then you may have already figured out the whole calories-in, calories-out formula by determining your BMR, or the amount of calories you need to maintain your weight. If you haven't done that there is a great online calculator at fitnessmagazine.com/weight-loss/bmr where you enter you activity level, then add whatever calories you burn during your workouts. So if you enter "moderate" for your activity level because you exercise regularly, it would give you about 2,400 calories a day. Then if you added 500 calories burned per workout that means you could eat almost 3,000 calories a day without gaining a pound, or around 2,500 a day to lose a pound a week - right? Seems like a lot, but hey - you used a fitness calculator so it has to be right!
Not so fast...the BMR calculator already factors in the calories you burn with your workouts, so you can't add them in again. So if all this time you thought your daily needs were 500 calories higher than they really were, you might have been maintaining instead of losing.
If you need help figuring out your BMR, let me know. It's fairly simple to do, and helps give you another benchmark in your fitness journey.
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