If you want to lose fat or gain muscle, then you need to know how many calories you burn every day.

If you don’t, it’s going to be a lot harder than it should be, if not impossible.

You just aren’t sure how to actually do it – how to easily and accurately calculate how many calories you’re burning.

You’ve probably also poked around for an answer already and discovered that you have quite a few options.

Mathematical formulas, fitness and activity trackers, workout machine readouts, and so on.

Which can you rely on, though? Which will be best for you?

Well, that’s what you’re going to learn in this article.

How Many Calories Should I Eat Per Day
Eating a certain number of calories daily can help you achieve and maintain a healthy weight. Research further indicates that, when following a balanced diet, consuming the best number of calories for you can also help improve your health and boost longevity.

When determining how many calories you should eat per day, it helps to first understand the established recommended calorie intakes. From there, you can consider other factors to find the right calorie intake for you, given your body and health-related goals. Here is what you need to know about daily calorie consumption.

Recommended Calorie Intakes
Knowing the recommended calorie intake guidelines can provide a better idea of your calorie range. These vary based on whether you are an adult, a teen, or a child.

Factors That Affect Your Target Calorie Intake
As the recommended calorie intake guidelines suggest, the number of calories you need per day can vary based on various factors. Among them are:
Sex, Height, Weight, Age, Activity level.

Reaching Your Goal Weight
After entering your information into the calorie calculator, you'll receive a daily calorie goal. This is the number of calories you should eat daily to reach your desired weight in the set time frame.

You also burn additional calories from everyday movements, as well as exercise, which can vary considerably from person to person. If you’ve ever wondered how many calories you burn each day.

With one more calculation, which considers your activity levels, you can work out how many calories you need each day to maintain your current weight. Eating fewer calories than this will likely result in weight loss, while eating more calories than this will likely lead to weight gain.

How Many Calories Do You Really Burn While Exercising?

If scientific tests are inconvenient and expensive and fitness and activity trackers and workout machine readouts are hinky, what’s the best solution?

How can you figure out how many calories you’re burning through exercise and physical activity?

Well, the easiest method is a system based on what’s called a “Metabolic Equivalent of Task,” or “MET.”

Think of a MET like a calorie, but instead of measuring the amount of energy required to heat one kilogram of water one degree Celsius, it’s the amount of energy an average size person will burn while sitting still for one minute.
Different activities are assigned different MET scores.

Walking at a slow pace for a minute burns about double the amount of energy as sitting still, and thus has a MET score of 2. Vacuuming is more vigorous, so it’s listed at 3.5 METs, and so forth.

You can find the MET scores of a wide variety of physical activities in The Compendium of Physical Activities Tracking Guide.