Why you should use a Diet Calculator
Dieting is hard. Eating healthy and staying consistent with your diet plan is one of the most difficult aspects of living a healthy lifestyle and trying to get fit. One reason for this is the lack of a clear idea of how much calories you should be consuming and the way your body functions. People can fall into the trap of thinking as long as I don’t eat certain foods and I watch how much I snack then I should be fine.
The truth is that, without clear goals or an understanding of, first, how your body is functioning currently, and second, the amount that you should be consuming per day, you will find it extremely difficult to meet both your fitness and your diet goals.
One way to help you overcome these challenges is by using a diet calculator. Diet calculators give you precise and useful data that will help you to fully understand your body and how much calories you should be consuming. This article will explore diet calculators, the benefits of using them, and will explain how they work.
What are calories
Before getting into diet calculators and how to use them, it is important to understand exactly what goes into your body and how it affects you. Calories are found in the foods we eat, whether it is protein, carbohydrates, fats, or sugars. Calories are where we get our energy throughout the day and, without calories, we wouldn’t be able to function properly.
Not all calories are created equally, however. There are calorie rich foods, low calorie foods, and empty calorie foods. High calorie (or calorie dense) foods are foods that have a high amount of calories relative to their serving size and can include oil, butter, fried food. and sweets. Low calorie foods refer to foods that have a low amount of calories relative to their serving size, such as fruits and vegetables. Empty calories foods are foods that contain little to no nutrients. These are usually processed foods that contain a lot of added sugars and solid fats.
The quantity and type of calories that you are eating will determine how hard or easy it will be for you to lose, maintain, or gain weight depending on your diet and fitness goals. The most important thing is to eat foods that contain a lot of vitamins and minerals and are healthy for you. Staying away from processed foods as much as possible is the easiest way to ensure that you aren’t eating empty calorie foods and are eating foods that will positively impact your goals.
What are diet calculators
As mentioned before, knowing how much you should be eating in order to meet your goals is very difficult, and unless you see a doctor or have a personal trainer, can be difficult to figure out for yourself. One way to get this information is to use a diet calorie calculator. Diet calculators are used to determine how much calories you should be consuming per day, as well as a host of other useful information such as your total daily energy expenditure. Diet calculators use your basic information and input this into different formulas to work out your calorie and energy data.
Benefits of using Diet Calculators
There are many benefits to using diet calculators. By using a diet calculator, you are able to get useful information that you can use to influence and optimise your diet and workouts. You get specific information about how much calories you should be eating per day and the maximum amount of fat that your body can metabolise. It also gives you useful and insightful information such as your body mass index (BMI), basal metabolic rate (BMR), lean body mass (LBM), and fat body mass (FBM) that you can use to classify your current fitness levels and help frame your fitness and diet goals for the future.
LBL’s diet calculator also allows you to input what you want your final weight to be and calculates how many weeks you have left to your goal and what your final weight will be, given the data you inputted. By using the calculator regularly, you will have an accurate measure of your progress and will be able to clearly see how much progress you are, or are not, making.
How Diet Calculators work
Diet calculators are simple and easy to use. Most calculators will ask for simple information such as age, height, weight, gender, and activity level. LBL’s calculator also asks you for your goal weight, number of workouts you do per week, body fat percentage, and your fitness goals (whether you want to maintain your current weight, lose weight, gain weight, etc). This means that our diet calculator is more in depth and asks for more information than most calculators in order to get a deeper understanding of your specific diet and fitness goals and give you more precise information.
Once you have inputted your basic information and chosen the formula that you would like to use to determine your results, the diet calculator will produce the values of various variables, such as your body mass index (BMI), total daily energy expenditure (TDEE), and basal metabolic rate (BMR). Some of the most popular formulas used include the Mifflin-St Jeor formula, the Harris-Benedict formula, the Katch-Macardle formula, and the Cunningham formula. All of these formulas use your basic information but some of them require additional information such as you lean body mass. If you don’t know your lean body mass but know your body mass percentage then this can be used instead.
One of the good things about using diet calculators is that, even if you don’t know your details off hand, they are simple enough to find out and easy enough to calculate if you need to. This means that they are easily accessible for everyone.
Conclusion
Diet calculators aren’t magic tools. They are not going to tell you every single miniscule detail about your body but, what they will do, is give you some specific information that you can use to frame your diet and workout goals. They can inform you about how many calories you should be consuming daily and how many calories you burn, and allow you to accurately track your progress in terms of your weight, basal metabolic rate, body mass index, and other variables. LBL’s calculator takes this feature even further by incorporating a goals section into our calculations, meaning that you get an accurate and real time update on how many weeks you are away from your goal based on your current physical condition in relation to the goal you have set for yourself.