Burning 1,000 calories in a day may sound like a lofty goal, but is it? And is it even healthy? The short answer: It depends. How difficult it is to burn 1,000 calories depends on how you define “burning 1,000 calories.” Almost everybody’s body requires at least 1,000 calories a day through essential biological functions, like replenishing hormone levels and building new tissues. Daily activities such as cleaning your house, walking, and gardening can also burn a significant number of calories throughout the day. For some people, these activities may burn more than 1,000 calories.
Understanding Calorie Burn
Before delving into the specifics of burning 1,000 calories a day, it’s essential to understand what a calorie is and how our bodies use them. A calorie is simply a unit of energy. In nutrition, it measures the energy your body gets from food and drinks. The term calorie describes the amount of energy in foods or drinks. The human body requires this energy to fuel essential metabolic processes. Understanding this concept is essential for accurately tracking your progress. And while steady weight loss may not be as exciting as rapid weight loss, it’s the best way to reach your goals and maintain your long-term progress.
Factors Influencing Calorie Expenditure
The number of calories an individual needs each day varies based on biological sex, height, weight, activity level, and genetics. According to the Dietary Guidelines for Americans 2020-2025, the average female adult needs about 1,800-2,400 calories daily, while the average male adult needs about 2,400-3,200 calories.
Several factors influence how many calories you burn each day:
Body Size and Composition: Usually, males and people with bigger bodies burn more calories per day than females and people with smaller bodies. The more muscle mass you have, the more calories you burn, even at rest. That’s why people who strength train often see a boost in their daily calorie burn. For example, a 100-pound female will have to spend much more time exercising to burn 1,000 calories than a 250-pound male.
Read also: The Power of 100 Calories
Age: As we age, our metabolism naturally slows down, lowering the number of calories burned at rest. Younger individuals usually have a higher basal metabolic rate, which means their bodies burn more energy during daily activities.
Activity Level: The intensity and duration of your workouts play a huge role in how many calories you burn.
Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR): Your BMR reflects the calories your body burns at complete rest. But here’s the fun part: combining a higher BMR with regular movement, like cardio, strength training, or simply exercising regularly, can drastically increase your total daily calorie burn.
Burning 1,000 Calories Through Exercise
Burning 1,000 calories through exercise alone or in a single exercise session is more difficult, but not impossible.
Examples of Calorie-Burning Activities
Here’s an example of what it would take to burn 1,000 calories per day in three different ways. Keep in mind the exact number of calories you will burn is unique to your body.
Read also: Achieving a Healthier You: Calorie Burning
Running: For example, a 150-pound person running at a 10-minute mile pace for 90 minutes burns about 1,020 calories.
Cycling: According to the ACE, here’s a rough guide to how many hours it would take to burn 1,000 calories cycling.
Without Exercise: You burn calories during all your daily activities. Over the course of a day, these calories may add up to a significant number. For example, for an average male, washing the dishes burns about 174 to 252 calories per hour. Here’s a look at what it would take to burn 1,000 calories without exercising:
Individual Differences
Burning 1,000 calories a day is easier for some people than others. For example, a 6-foot, 3-inch 18-year-old male playing on multiple sports teams might easily burn more than 1,000 calories a day exercising. For a 5-foot, 1-inch 40-year-old female who works a desk job, burning 1,000 calories a day will be more difficult.
Is Burning 1,000 Calories a Day Healthy?
That depends on your reason for trying to burn them. If you’re an active person who eats enough to replenish the calories you burn, there’s nothing wrong with burning 1,000 calories a day through exercise. However, exercising vigorously to lose weight quickly or to offset binge eating are not healthy habits and can be signs of an eating disorder. Exercising regularly is good for your body, but exercising vigorously to lose an extreme amount of weight or exercising to offset binge eating isn’t.
Read also: Is Burning 600 Calories Safe?
Considering Your Goals
If you’re targeting to burn 1,000 calories a day, it may be a good idea to ask yourself why. If your goal is to improve your overall fitness or get stronger, measuring your progress in calories burned is a poor way to get meaningful feedback. Keeping track of other markers, such as your body fat percentage, cardiovascular fitness, or strength levels, is a more accurate way to assess your progress. If your goal is to lose weight, burning a set number of calories is meaningless without context. If you burn an extra 1,000 calories through exercise each day but consume an extra 1,000 calories, your weight will stay the same.
Potential Risks of Overexertion
It is not advised to immediately go from coach-potato status to burning 1,000 calories daily. Be realistic about your current fitness level before you embark on a program. Endurance athletes, such as those training for long-course triathlons or ultra marathons, do put in 1,000 calories worth of training or more on most days. These individuals work up to these levels of exercise, though, and take time in the off-season to exercise more moderately.
Also, evaluate how much time you have to devote to exercise. If you have a demanding job and a busy family life, you may be unable to carve out 2 or 3 hours per day for exercise. If you skimp on sleep to squeeze in time for extra exercise, you may do yourself more harm than good. You'll lack the energy to maximize your burn.
Recognizing Signs of Eating Disorders
Starting a new and intense exercise program isn’t a good idea if you have a health condition such as diabetes or heart disease that could be affected by exercise, unless you get the green light from your doctor. It’s also not a good idea to purposely burn a significant number of calories without refueling properly if you’re already below a healthy weight for your sex and height. Purposely not eating after periods of heavy exercise can be a sign of the eating disorder anorexia. Exercising intensely after periods of binge eating can be a sign of bulimia or binge eating disorder. If you think you may have an eating disorder, you may benefit from talking with a healthcare professional who specializes in eating disorders.
Calorie Deficit and Weight Loss
To lose weight, you need to move more and eat less. Understanding how much more to move can be confusing. That's because the amount of calories you need daily to lose weight depends on many factors, including your:
- Weight-loss goal
- Your eating
- How you burn those calories
While weight loss may be your primary goal, physical activity has many health benefits, like:
- Better joint mobility
- Protection against chronic disease
- Enhanced mood
- Improved stamina
So, beyond burning calories, know you're doing your body a world of good when you move more.
Calculating Your Calorie Needs
According to Kansas State University, The total number of calories you burn daily depends on your:
- Age
- Height
- Weight
- Muscle mass
- How much you exercise
There are several formulas to calculate your total daily energy expenditure, or TDEE (more on that in a minute). Still, a more straightforward method is based only on body weight. While it's not as accurate, it can give you a starting point to work from without having to do a lot of math:
- Daily calories burned: 15-16 per pound of body weight
- calories needed for weight loss: 12-13 per pound of body weight
- required calories for weight gain: 18-19 per pound of body weight
To get a more exact idea of your TDEE, you need to know four things, per Kansas State University:
- Resting Metabolic Rate (RMR)
- Thermic Effect of Food (TEF)
- Non-exercise Activity Thermogenesis (NEAT)
- Calories Burned During Exercise
Multiply your RMR by your activity level to get your estimated TDEE, per Kansas State University:
- Sedentary: BMR x 1.2 (little or no exercise, desk job)
- Lightly active: BMR x 1.375 (light exercise 1-3 days per week)
- Moderately active: BMR x 1.55 (moderate exercise 6-7 days per week)
- Very active: BMR x 1.725 (challenging exercise every day, or exercising twice per day)
- Extra active: BMR x 1.9 (challenging exercise two or more times per day, or training for a marathon, triathlon, etc.)
Predicting Weight Loss
Burning 1,000 calories daily through exercise or a combination of diet and exercise creates a 7,000-calorie weekly deficit. This equates to approximately 2 pounds of weight loss. Most experts agree you must have a 3,500-calorie weekly deficit to lose 1 pound. So if you burn 1,000 calories a day-or 7,000 calories per week-you could lose 2 pounds a week.
Factors Affecting Weight Loss Rate
It’s not that straightforward. Your rate of weight loss depends on your training age. Your training age refers to how many years you’ve been doing strength training. It also depends on your training, diet, and other genetic, lifestyle, and environmental factors.
To make things more complicated, your progress will eventually stall when you’re on a weight loss plan. You can only sustain a 2-pound-per-week rate of weight loss for so long.
Nutrition and Calorie Intake
If you’re burning 1,000 calories a day through exercise, the amount you should eat depends on your goal.
Weight Loss: If your goal is to lose weight, you’ll need to consume fewer calories than you burn. Reducing your calories by 500 to 600 a day under your maintenance level can lead to about a pound of weight loss per week. This is often considered a healthy rate. Attempting a “crash diet” or a highly restrictive diet to lose weight is rarely successful in the long term.
Weight Maintenance: If your goal is to maintain your weight, you’ll need to eat the same number of calories that you’re burning.
Weight Gain: To gain weight, you’ll need to eat more.
The Dangers of Very Low-Calorie Diets (VLCDs)
A 1,000 calorie diet plan is an eating strategy that drastically cuts the number of calories a person consumes each day. However, drastically cutting calories does not typically result in sustained weight loss and may be harmful. Extreme diets have undesirable effects and do not result in sustained weight loss. Instead, it is better to reach a moderate weight gradually with a balanced diet that a person can follow long term.
Experts consider this type of diet dangerous because they provide significantly fewer calories than the average adult needs for health and well-being. While adults could follow this type of diet relatively safely for a couple of weeks, it is not something that doctors advise for extended periods. A large body of research shows that when people do not eat a balanced diet with sufficient calories for their needs, it can harm health and trigger rebound weight gain.
Potential Side Effects
Extreme reductions in calorie intake can cause harmful side effects, such as:
- Dizziness
- Extreme hunger
- Gallstones
- Nausea
- Fatigue
- Headaches
- Nutrient deficiencies
Impact on Metabolism
Following an LCD or VLCD can lead to dramatic weight loss - at least in the beginning. But the rapid weight loss often seen with a 1,000-calorie diet can slow your resting metabolic rate, or how many calories you burn at rest. This can contribute to weight regain and sabotage your weight loss efforts over time. When people lose weight, their resting metabolic rate slows down to adjust to the body’s reduced energy needs. Eventually, your body stops responding to the calorie deficit.
Hormonal Imbalances
Rapid and extreme weight loss also disrupts the hormones that regulate appetite. Your body produces less of a hormone that tells your brain when you’re full, called leptin, and more of a hormone that tells you when to eat, called ghrelin. This combination increases your urge to eat, which can make maintaining your rigid diet more challenging. All of these factors make weight regain more likely after a drastic calorie deficit.
Safe and Sustainable Weight Loss Strategies
The best way to lose weight safely and successfully is by adopting healthy eating habits. Start with small, realistic goals, and then, as these become a habit, increase the goals. For example, make it a goal to start each dinner with a side salad or serve vegetables as a side dish. Once this becomes standard practice, introduce a second goal, such as having fruit with breakfast.
Also, think about setting some exercise goals. A good example is setting a goal to walk for 15 minutes 3 times a week. Once this becomes routine, increase the time or number of sessions each week. Setting small goals and increasing them over time sets people up for success. Also, small goals are easy to implement and sustain.
Remember that it takes time to gain weight, so it may take even more time to lose weight safely. Quick weight-loss plans have little scientific support and can lead to individuals regaining all the weight they lost and more.
Incorporating NEAT
Instead of relying on exercise alone to boost your burn, consider how you could benefit from NEAT or non-exercise thermogenesis. NEAT refers to any calorie-burning activity that is not a formal exercise. This includes:
- Walking
- Doing household chores
- Fidgeting
- Showering
Modern conveniences, from cars to computers, rob you of daily activities that burn calories. Walk to the store, doctor, or school-if possible. Do a brief walk after breakfast, one at lunch, and one after dinner to connect with your family. Clean your house, do laundry, and wash your car. These activities seem small, but the calorie burn adds up quickly to 500 or more daily. Suppose you can burn 500 calories or more through non-exercise activity and another 500 through exercise. In that case, you've easily achieved a 1,000-calorie daily burn in addition to your BMR without over-stressing your body.
Seeking Professional Guidance
Many people find working with a personal trainer or another fitness professional helps them achieve their weight loss or fitness target. A personal trainer can help motivate you to stick with your program and help you establish realistic goals. They can also design an effective program for you and answer any questions you may have. Some trainers specialize in helping people with little to no experience exercising, while other trainers work with people who are already fit to take them to the next level. It’s a good idea to talk with your doctor before starting a new exercise program if you have heart disease or another health condition that may preclude you from intense exercise.