In all honesty, the above scenario would be a great way to live because we’d never have to worry about overeating or being overweight, but unfortunately, we live in the real world and in the real world we don’t have a handy dandy nifty little fuel gauge built right there into our bodies. 

Here in the real world most of us are completely clueless as to how much fuel we are putting inside our bodies.

People guesstimate.

Or…to put it more accurately, normal people guesstimate.  

And 99.999999 percent of normal people are absolutely terrible at this.

But these normal people, which is the vast majority of the world, will justify their terribleness by blabbering on and on about how healthy they are eating. I’m eating fruits, they’ll say. Or, almonds. Or you’ll hear all about how yogurt is extremely healthy. As are lentils and lean meats and salads and oats.  

And then they’ll eat and eat and eat these things, and have a large M&M Blizzard as a reward for dessert. And why not, they’ve earned it. I mean they’ve been eating healthy, right?

Riiiiiiggggghhhht???

These same normal people will say, “I’m doing the Keto diet.” Or, “I’m doing Paleo.” Or avocados have healthy fats. Or eggs have a lot of protein. 

And that’s great!

Because all those things are good and true. 

But here’s another truth: you can still get fat on Keto and on Paleo and by eating avocados and eggs and any other foods out there. 

You will get fat if you eat more calories than your body can burn. 

The diet doesn’t matter. Nor does the food type. Nor does the time of day you eat.

What matters is this:

If you eat more calories than your body can burn, you will gain weight.

Period.

It’s that simple.

If you enjoy the Keto diet, then awesome—keep doing the Keto diet, but to lose weight you must ensure you are not eating more calories than your body can burn while on the keto diet. 

Same with Paleo. 

And Adkins.

Same with any other diet or eating preference. 

The rules of all these different diets (like Keto or Paleo) are in place to encourage you to eat lower calorie foods so you won’t eat more than your body can burn. 

Normal people have a hard time swallowing this. They think there’s magic in the Paleo diet. Or magic in Keto. But there is no magic.

There is only math. 

And the math looks like this:

If you eat 2,200 calories today but your body burns only 2,000 calories, then you will gain weight.

That extra 200 calories has to go somewhere.

And it goes into thunder thighs, love handles, and chubby chins. 

However, if you eat 1,800 calories today and your body burns 2,000 calories, then you will lose weight. 

Because your body needs those 2,000 calories for fuel, so if you’re not giving it all 2,000 when you eat, then it will steal what it needs from the thunder thighs, the love handles, and the chubby chin.  

That’s it.

That’s how fat loss works. 

Now that we know what causes us to gain weight, the two key questions for weight loss become:

1.) How many calories does my body burn everyday? 
2.) How many calories can I eat everyday to guarantee weight loss? 

These were (and still are) the fundamental questions I had to answer before I structured an eating plan that would both guarantee I would lose weight and allow me to maintain my sanity. 

Both are important!

The first thing I did to ensure I could eat the foods I love (Hello, Lasagna!) while still getting in great shape was to figure out how much I could realistically eat without getting fatter.

Basically, when was my tank full?

There’s a couple different ways to figure out the answer to this simple question, but keep in mind, you only need one to figure it out. 

Normal people will research method after method and decide they need to do the most difficult one, which they’ll then determine they can’t do right now and because they can’t do it right now they’ll justify that as a reason to not do anything right now and then they will eat half a Domino’s pizza and blame their ever increasing weight gain on their terribly slow metabolism.

This is not a joke. It’s not me trying to be funny. 

I honestly used to do things like this. It happens.

But that doesn’t mean it has to happen to you.

With that said, the simplest and easiest way to figure out how many calories you can eat is to use one of the hundreds of online calorie calculators.

Are some of these online calorie calculators better than others?

Of course.

Is this method one hundred percent accurate?

Absolutely not.

But here’s the thing, nothing is going to be one hundred percent accurate in this regard. The amount of calories you burn today will be different than the amount of calories you burned yesterday. And they’ll be different than the amount you burn tomorrow.

If you sneeze tomorrow and didn’t sneeze today, then you’ll burn additional calories tomorrow because your body had to exert energy while sneezing. If you took a few stairs yesterday, or walked one more step than you did the previous day, or lifted an Amazon package, or any of a hundred things that change from day to day, then the calories that you burn would change in proportion to those different levels of activity. 

So don’t worry about obtaining one hundred percent accuracy in regards to daily expenditure of your calories burned. Don’t let something that mundane prevent you from beginning. You only need to worry about getting yourself a baseline that is fairly accurate.  

Here is the calorie calculator I used when I started my journey.