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are burning because of the fact that measuring how many calories foods contain can be difficult. However measuring how much you are burning every day can be done through using a pedometer or similar device that measures calories burned while you are wearing it. These usually resemble a wristwatch and can be found at most health and fitness stores as well as online.

The other way to figure out how many calories you should be eating and how it affects your weight is to figure out your basal metabolic rate or BMR. This can be found using a simple formula as follows:

Women: BMR = 655 + ( 4.35 x weight in pounds ) + ( 4.7 x height in inches ) - ( 4.7 x age in years )
Men: BMR = 66 + ( 6.23 x weight in pounds ) + ( 12.7 x height in inches ) - ( 6.8 x age in year )

So taking a 200 pound, 25 year old, 6 foot tall man as an example would work out as:

66 + (6.23 x 200 = 1246) + (4.7 x 72 = 338.4) - (6.8 x 25 = 170) = 2056.4 calories per day.

The BMR measurement however is only the amount of calories you would need if you remained fairly sedate during the day and didn't do any exercise. Things such as working, exercising and even studying will mean that extra calories are needed for maintaining your current rate.

However the good thing about the BMR is that once you know your basic calorific need, you can then calculate how much you need to burn each day if you want to lose weight, or how much you need to consume to gain weight. Each pound of fat contains approximately 3500 calories, so burning an extra 500 calories per day than you are eating will lead to you losing a pound every week.

The fact that the bigger you are the more calories you need to maintain your weight, is the reason that diets tend to make you lose weight faster at the start then they do after the first few weeks. For example if someone who is extremely overweight begins a new diet, they might be going from eating 5000 calories every day to 1500. Presuming that they stick to the diet, they will then lose over 1 pound per day for the first few weeks. However after some weight has been lost then the calories needed per day to maintain weight will be lower, and weight loss slows down.

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