How to calculate calorie need: Including during bulking and cutting phase
To attain fitness, you should know how many calories the body needs by calculating how many calories the body needs daily.
Written By
Joy EmehHuman Anatomist | Health Editor
Key takeaways:
- A calorie is used to measure the amount of energy in drinks or foods. Your body has specific daily calorie needs, and when you eat more than that, your body stores the excess as fat. Over time, this can lead to weight gain, especially if you don't participate in physical activities to burn the fat.
- To calculate your daily calorie need, multiply your basal metabolic rate by your activity level multiplier. The formula for calculating calorie need is: (Weight (in kg) ✖ 24) ✖ (lean factor multiplier) ✖ activity level multiplier.
- Food macronutrients contain calories in varying amounts, and different factors, including weight, height, gender, and activity level, influence a person's daily calorie needs.
Apart from exercise, nutrition is an essential aspect of bodybuilding and fitness. Unfortunately, many people do not understand their bodies' dietary requirements.
Learning how to calculate calories is necessary, as muscle building requires consuming an adequate number of calories daily.
This article offers a guide on how to calculate body calorie needs (also called maintenance calories). It also discusses macronutrients and how to calculate the number of calories to consume during the cutting or bulking phase.
What are macronutrients?
Macronutrients are also called 'macros'. They are generally the major nutrient types that provide the body with energy.
There are three macronutrients, namely- proteins, fats, and carbohydrates. To keep fit, your dietary constituents should comprise these three macronutrients in the right quantity.
Your caloric intake should comprise foods from the three macronutrients. A study review recommended that people consume the macronutrients in the following percentages:
- 15-20% of calories from fat
- 25–30% of calories from protein
- 55–60% of calories from carbohydrates
Other classes of food (vitamins and minerals) do not provide calories. But, each of the three macronutrients provides the body with calories.
Calories
There is a misconception that calories are bad. Calories are not bad because your body needs them for energy. However, eating too many calories without burning them off is not the best for your health.
A calorie is a unit of energy. Calories are the amount of energy your body releases after food breakdown (digestion). The higher the calories contained in a food, the greater the energy the food can provide to the body.
Every human activity (whether running, jumping, or sitting on the couch) depends on energy from calories.
If you eat excess calories than your body needs, the body stores the extra calories as fat. This means that even foods that are not fat can contain lots of calories. Excess calories, irrespective of the class of food, can be stored as fat.
The number of calories in each of the macronutrients varies. A gram of carbohydrates provides four calories to the body. A gram of protein provides four calories to the body, while a gram of fat provides nine calories.
Understanding what a calorie is and calculating calorie needs will help you make better decisions with food consumption.
Bulking and cutting phase
Weight maintenance requires not consuming too many or too few calories. It means consuming just enough calories to maintain a healthy weight.
For people who are into bodybuilding, the body has to go through two phases: the 'cutting phase' and the 'bulking phase'.
The cutting phase involves cutting out excess fat. This phase is crucial, particularly for overweight people. In the cutting phase, you are expected to consume fewer calories.
The bulking phase is the opposite of the cutting phase. It is also an important phase for every bodybuilder because this is when you build the needed lean muscle mass. In this phase, you consume more calories than in the cutting phase.
Photo source: Shutterstock
Some people make a mistake with the bulking phase: they don't bulk right. The fact that you are supposed to increase your calorie intake during this time period does not imply that you eat everything in sight. Every bodybuilder must find out the best foods for bodybuilding and stick with them.
Remember that eating unhealthy foods makes it harder to get fit and causes the body to store fat that it doesn't need. Also, there are many factors that can influence daily caloric intake, including height, gender, weight, age, and activity level.
How to calculate your body's daily calorie need
The body's calorie needs is also called 'maintenance calorie'. Body calorie needs mean the number of calories the body needs to maintain its weight. It is the number of calories the body needs to perform daily physical activities and basic metabolic functions.
One easy way to determine how many calories the body needs is to use simple calculations. You either do a simple calculation or use an online calorie calculator.
Whether you are calculating yourself or using a calorie calculator, you will need to weigh yourself first. This is because body weight will be required to calculate the body's caloric need.
Below is how to calculate body caloric needs, so you don't eat too many calories.
Step 1: Find your weight in kilograms. If your weight is in pounds, convert it to Kg by dividing it by 2.2 (1 kg equals 2.2 pounds).
Step 2: For men, multiply the weight by 1.0. For women, multiply by 0.9 (this shows gender is considered when calculating body caloric needs).
Step 3: Multiply by 24
Step 4: Again, multiply everything by your lean factor, as shown in the table below (there is a table for males and another for females). This will give you your basal metabolic rate.
Basal metabolic rate (BMR) is the number of calories your body will burn daily, assuming you lay in bed doing nothing throughout the day. The basal metabolic rate is important for calculating the number of calories the body needs every day.
Body fat percentage | Lean factor multiplier | |
|---|---|---|
10-14 | 1.0 | |
15-20 | 0.95 | |
21-28 | 0.90 | |
over 28 | 0.85 |
Body fat percentage | Lean factor multiplier | |
|---|---|---|
14-18 | 1.0 | |
19-28 | 0.95 | |
29-38 | 0.90 | |
Over 38 | 0.85 |
(You can use an online calculator to find out your body fat percentage. Your fitness trainer can also help you do that).
Example: Calculating daily calorie needs
If you are a female with a body weight of 65 kg and a body fat percentage that falls between 19 kg to 28 kg, you calculate your BMR first in this way:
65 * 0.9(female) * 24 * 0.95 (the lean factor multiplier for your body fat percentage)
=1,334
1,334 is the number of calories your body would burn if you were to lie on your couch all day doing nothing.
The next step after finding your BMR is to calculate your caloric need. This is where you will need an activity modifier (a measure of your level of activity).
Step 5: Multiply your BMR by your activity level multiplier (as shown in the table below)
Activity level multiplier | Level of activeness | |
|---|---|---|
1.3 | Very light activity e.g., sitting, light walk, studying, typical office job that requires sitting | |
1.55 | Light activity, e.g., a job that requires standing such as laboratory job and teaching | |
1.65 | Moderate activity e.g., jobs that require moderate physical activeness such as biking, landscaping and cleaning | |
1.80 | Heavy activity e.g., heavy manual jobs such as athletics, engine manipulation and construction (Hard physical activity for about 4 hour per day |
With this, you can easily calculate your body's calorie need. For instance, if your activity modifier falls within the moderate range, your activity level multiplier is 1.65.
This means you multiply your BMR by 1.65
i.e. 1,334 * 1.65 = 2,201
Thus, your body needs you to consume 2,201 calories daily to maintain weight ( weight maintenance calories). However, you might want to adjust your caloric intake depending on whether you want to gain weight or lose weight.
If you want to lose weight, you must consume fewer calories than your body burns daily (about 400 fewer calories). On the other hand, if you want to gain weight, you have to consume more calories than your body burns daily (about 400 more calories).
Also, note that you can easily calculate your body calorie needs using an online calculator. It will help to know how many calories the body needs daily, as this will help you adjust your dietary habits.
How to calculate caloric intake during the bulking and cutting phase
If your weight is consistently the same (no loss or decrease), it means you consume the right amount of weight maintenance calories. However, if your weight decreases, you experience a calorie deficit. This means you need to increase your calorie intake.
For the bulking phase, it is recommended that you increase your daily calorie consumption by 15 percent, while for the cutting phase, you reduce your daily caloric consumption by 15 percent.
This means if your daily maintenance calorie is 2,201 (as we calculated earlier), you should eat 1,870.9 calories daily during the cutting phase.
Here is how to calculate that:
First, get 15% of 2,201. i.e., 2,201 * (15/100)
= 2,201 * 0.15 = 330.15
Go ahead and subtract 330.15 from 2,201
2201 - 330.15 = 1,870.9
Thus, if you are in your cutting phase (you want to shed some fat), you should consume 1,870.9 calories. This is about 300-400 calories less than your maintenance calorie.
Also, for the bulking phase, you calculate the number of calories you should consume just like in the cutting phase, except, in this case, you are increasing by 15 percent.
Since you already found 15 percent of 2,201 to be 330.15. You add 330.15 to 2,201 to get the number of calories you should consume in your bulking phase.
2,201 + 330.15 = 2531.15
Calculating caloric intake for the cutting and bulking phase is important, especially for bodybuilders and fitness enthusiasts.
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