Calculate your calorie requirements and your recommended amount of protein per day. Select the Detailed calculation at the end to determine your additional calorie requirements from your sporting activity.
If you want to build muscle or lose weight, nutrition plays an integral role. However, relying solely on your gut feeling is rarely the right choice. A calorie calculator will help you determine exactly how much energy you need to achieve your goal. But why use a calorie requirement calculator at all when it is stated everywhere that the daily calorie requirement of an adult is 2000 kcal? This applies to the average, but you are individual! Your age, size and other factors have a direct influence on your calorie consumption.
Read on if you want to know what your calorie requirements are for building muscle or achieving your summer figure and how your individuality influences them.
Your calorie requirement: a result of many components
How much energy the body needs is never static. Your calorie requirement is constantly changing and is made up of your basal metabolic rate, your energy expenditure and your goal. In a nutshell, you can think of it like this:
The basal metabolic rate is the energy the body needs to keep itself alive. The power metabolic rate is the additional energy required for work and sport.
The goal has an influence, as less energy is required to lose weight and more energy is required to build muscle.
The basal metabolic rate - everything the body needs to maintain life
The basal metabolic rate includes the energy required to maintain life. For us humans, this includes blood circulation, breathing, digestion and thermoregulation. This is always based on a state in which there is no mental or physical stress.
There must therefore be strict conditions in place to determine a person's correct BMR (basal metabolic rate). It must be at a time when no digestion is taking place and the stimulating sympathetic nervous system must not be irritated.1
The level of a person's basal metabolic rate depends on their age, gender, weight and height. The body fat percentage (BFA) also plays a role in the calculation. This is because the largest energy consumer in the body is the muscles and the lower the KFA, the higher the fat-free body mass.
A rough basal metabolic rate formula states that the body burns around 1 kcal per kilogram of body weight per hour.2
Performance metabolic rate - activities burn energy
One day you are on the move from early in the morning until late at night and another day you might be Netflix & Chill. Your energy expenditure is the energy you need for everything that your basal metabolic rate doesn't cover. So if you do sports, watch TV or think intensively about something, the energy consumption falls into this category.
A calorie calculator usually asks for your activity level. Certain PAL factors have been defined for the calculation. PAL stands for Physical Activity Level, i.e. the level of physical activity. The more active a person is, the higher the PAL factor.
This is an extract from the PAL value of the German Nutrition Society (DGE). For intensive sport (30 - 60 minutes, four to five times a week), 0.3 PAL units can be added.3
PAL: Activity level
1.2-1.3: Exclusively sedentary or recumbent lifestyle
1.4-1.5: Exclusively sedentary activity with little or no strenuous leisure activity
1.6-1.7: Sedentary work, at times also additional energy expenditure for walking and standing activities, little or no strenuous leisure activity
1.8-1.9: predominantly walking and standing work
2.0-2.4: physically strenuous occupational work or very active leisure activity
The performance metabolic rate can be calculated using the PAL factor. To do this, the PAL factor must be multiplied by the basal metabolic rate and the basal metabolic rate subtracted from the result.
The corresponding formula is:
Performance metabolic rate = basal metabolic rate * PAL - basal metabolic rate
As the performance metabolic rate is derived directly from the basal metabolic rate, it is independent of factors such as age or gender. The power metabolic rate is always directly proportional to the basal metabolic rate.
The calorie consumption of typical activities
Enough maths. How many calories do you burn during everyday activities such as jogging, reading or sex?4 With this calculator you can work it out for your values yourself.
For the following values, we have assumed a 1.80 m tall, 75 kg male person aged 30. Generally speaking, the more intense the activity, the more energy is consumed.
Activity: Duration in min
Badminton with friends: 30
Bowling: 90
Comfortable cycling (less than 16 km/h): 20
Fast cycling (22.5 - 25.5 km/h): 60
Walking (4 km/h): 30
Jogging (10 km/h): 45
Cleaning: 40
Mowing the lawn: 50
Sex with moderate activity: 30
Sports for muscle building, high exertion: 60
Yoga: 25
Your goal - weight loss or muscle gain have a major influence
The third and final crucial component in determining your calorie requirements is your goal. Depending on whether you just want to find out your regular total calorie intake, build muscle or lose weight, your daily calorie requirement will vary.
A person who wants to maintain their weight only needs to focus on their total calorie intake. When building muscle or losing weight, on the other hand, a calorie surplus or deficit is required.
The calorie requirement for losing weight
If your goal is to lose weight, you will inevitably need to consume more calories than your body needs. To get a rough guide, you should first calculate your calorie requirements using the calorie calculator.
When it comes to weight loss, it is worth knowing that 1 kg of body fat corresponds to around 7000 kcal. [<[sup>5 Based on this, recommendations are to eat 500 kcal less than the daily calorie requirement every day6 This way, an excess kilo of fat disappears from your hips in 2 weeks. It is therefore not necessary to calculate the exact calorie deficit.
However, you don't have to starve yourself when losing weight. Physical activity can increase your metabolic rate, which means you need more energy. This makes losing weight bearable, as your usual food consumption is not restricted, but there is still a calorie deficit.
The calorie requirement for muscle building
If your goal is to build muscle, your body needs more energy as it builds up new body mass. There is no universal answer to how much the energy requirement increases in the process.
There are two different approaches in bodybuilding: lean bulk and dirty bulk. The former involves only moderately increasing calorie intake in order to put on as little additional fat as possible while building muscle.
Dirty bulk, on the other hand, aims to put on as much mass as possible in a short period of time. As a rule, the bulking phase is followed by a cutting phase in which excess fat is trained off.
If you want to calculate your calorie requirements, it depends on which strategy you are pursuing. For lean bulking, which involves slowly building up mass, a surplus of 5 to 10 % is sufficient.7 A dirty bulk means eat as much as you can
.What factors influence calorie consumption?
Gender - the basal metabolic rate of women is lower than that of men
Men have a higher calorie requirement than women. A man's basal metabolic rate is higher because women have a higher body fat percentage and men consequently have more lean muscle mass.8
However, a study has shown that if the basal metabolic rate of men and women is compared with their lean body mass, the difference is relativised.[<[sup>9
Size - more mass means a higher calorie requirement
The larger a body is, the more mass it has and the higher the energy consumption. This can be easily tested with a calorie calculator. Someone large will need more energy than a small person.
Interestingly, a study from Italy has shown that the BMR of a large person is lower than that of a small person when the results are adjusted for body weight or lean body mass. However, the energy consumption during walking is the same.10
Weight - the heavier the higher the energy consumption?
In fact, it is the lean body mass that is decisive. A 1.80 m tall, 65 kg person with a KFA of 10 % has a higher calorie requirement than a 1.80 m tall, 70 kg person with a KFA of 20 %. This can be easily checked with the calorie calculator.
Age - increasing age, dwindling muscles
There is a strong correlation between age and energy consumption. An 80-year-old generally needs fewer calories per day than a 20-year-old. The reason again lies in muscle mass.
The body's largest energy consumer is skeletal muscle. It is responsible for enabling the body to move as desired, for example when we move our arms and legs. As we get older, it decreases continuously, which also reduces the calorie requirement.11
Conclusion
The SATURO calorie consumption calculator makes it easy to calculate your calorie requirements. However, your best calorie calculator is yourself. Because if you are looking for a calorie calculator, you usually have a certain goal.
This is not achieved by itself, but only by following the numbers that the kcal calculator brings to light. You can calculate your calorie requirements to lose weight or build muscle. The important thing is that you stick to it.
We wish you lots of fun achieving your goals!
FAQ: Frequently asked questions about the calorie calculator
Do I have to reach the calorie requirement every day?
Your daily calorie requirement is specified by the calorie calculator. However, this does not mean that you have to consume exactly these calories every day; the body can cope with a slight fluctuation. Those who eat slightly more calories at the weekend than on Monday are even more successful at losing weight, as a study with more than 7,000 participants showed.12
How does the calorie requirement of men differ from that of women?
Men normally have more muscle than women, which is due to evolution. As muscles and lean body mass account for the lion's share of energy consumption, women's calorie requirements are lower than men's.
What is a calorie anyway?
The calorie (cal) is a unit of energy. So if someone wants to calculate their calories, the underlying aim is to find out how much energy the body needs. The unit usually used in nutrition is kcal, i.e. 1000 cal. This is the energy required to heat 1 kg of water by 1 °C.
What is the best calorie calculator?
There are many good free online calorie calculators that can estimate your individual daily requirement quite accurately. We recommend, for example, the calorie calculator from the German Nutrition Society (DGE), the calculator from yazio.com or from mydailypath.de. Ultimately, however, most reputable calculators provide very similar results - the decisive factor is that you provide honest information about your age, gender, weight, height and activity level.
How do you calculate the calorie requirement per day?
The daily calorie requirement is made up of the basal metabolic rate and the energy expenditure. You can estimate your basal metabolic rate, i.e. the energy your body needs at rest for vital processes alone, using formulas such as the Harris-Benedict formula (women: 655.1 + (9.6 x weight in kg) + (1.8 x height in cm) - (4.7 x age in years)). You then multiply the result by a factor of between 1.2 (almost exclusively sedentary) and 1.9 (physically strenuous work/very sporty), depending on your activity level, to get your total requirement.
How do I find out how many calories my food has?
Most foods have a nutritional value table that shows the calorie content per 100 g. You can then determine the calories quite accurately based on the packaging or by weighing/measuring the portion. It's even easier with apps such as MyFitnessPal, Yazio or Lifesum: here you can scan meals or select and track them from a large database. Websites such as naehrwertrechner.de or fddb.de also offer large nutritional value databases and practical search functions.
How many kcal a day should I eat to lose weight?
To lose weight, you need to eat fewer calories than you consume - your body then draws on its fat reserves. Experts recommend a moderate calorie deficit of 300-500 kcal per day for healthy, sustainable weight loss. This corresponds to around 0.5 to 1 kg weight loss per week. For an 80 kg, moderately active woman with a daily requirement of 2500 kcal, this would be around 2000-2200 kcal per day to lose weight. First calculate your daily requirement with a calorie calculator and then subtract the recommended 300-500 kcal to determine your individual calorie intake.
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Sources
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- McMurray, R. G., Soares, J., Caspersen, C. J., & McCurdy, T. (2014). Examining variations of resting metabolic rate of adults: a public health perspective. Medicine and science in sports and exercise, 46(7), 1352-1358.
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