Calorie requirement

I am sure I have said before that I find calories very confusing and that I will only ever use them as a rough guideline. Different people have different calorific needs and I for one haven’t got the time to weigh every bit of food I eat. However, I was thinking about the fact that I am trying to gain weight and am exercising a lot so thought it might be fun to compare how many calories I eat with how many I might need.

Spent some time trying to work out what my calorie requirement is. If you google things like “calorie requirements” you’ll find a whole host of diet sites that allow you to put in things like age, gender, weight, height and activity level and it gives you a rough estimate of your calorific needs. Take the results with a huge pinch of salt. And try a few different ones.

I got results that ranged from 1700 to 2500 calories per day. I then altered my search to “female calorie requirement to gain weight” and got referred to a number of body building websites. Now, this I don’t mind, I want to put on muscle after all. These website suggest I try to calculate my average calorie expenditure, now taking into account how active I am and roughly how many calories are burnt during the kind of exercise I do. Playing around with one of them, I got the result that in order to gain weight I need to eat roughly 2800 calories per day, basically saying I burn on average 2500 per day and need to eat more to bulk up. This, to me looks a lot more reasonable.

This still has to be taken with a huge pinch of salt though but I guess it’s giving me a rough idea. And looking at what I eat on a daily basis I think I consume roughly 2500 to 2800 calories a day. Still not really gaining weight at the speed I would like. However, I spoke to one of the personal trainers at my gym and he advised me to go for calorie dense food. Basically, this is food that packs a lot of protein and calories in one hit. A couple of hard boiled eggs, protein shake (in my case hemp protein) in fruit juice, nuts, pulses, etc.  Food that is compact.

I will at some point look into an idea I have that calories from different types of food behave differently in the body. My idea is that just counting calories isn’t enough and that eating an amount of calories in the form of brown rice is not the same as eating an equal amount of calories in the form of white rice. That fruit is better than sugar, even when the amount of calories is equal. It’s an idea, haven’t looked into it yet.

Links:

http://www.musclehack.com/how-many-calories-per-day-do-i-need-to-build-muscle/

http://www.bodybuilding.com/fun/issa64.htm