Embarking on a ketogenic diet can feel overwhelming. This article serves as a comprehensive guide, explaining the purpose of a keto calorie calculator and how to use it to achieve your health and weight loss goals. It emphasizes using the information provided by a keto calculator to understand and manage your macronutrient intake for successful ketosis.
Understanding the Basics
What is a Calorie?
A calorie is a fundamental unit of energy derived from food and beverages. Keeping track of these units can help you stay on track with your weight loss goals. If you consume fewer calories than your body needs to maintain its current weight, you create a calorie deficit and lose weight.
What are Macros?
Macros, short for macronutrients, are the three main components of our diet: carbohydrates, proteins, and fats. These provide the body with energy and support various physiological functions. The keto calculator helps determine how much of each macronutrient you should consume daily to reach your health goals or maintain your body weight.
What is the Ketogenic Diet?
The ketogenic diet is a high-fat, low-carb diet that shifts your body into a metabolic state called ketosis. In ketosis, your body turns fat into ketones for energy instead of relying on carbohydrates for glucose. On keto, it’s a general rule of thumb to stay under 30g net carbs a day. The end goal of a ketogenic diet is to be in a metabolic state known as ketosis.
Net Carbs vs. Total Carbs
When using a keto calculator, it's crucial to understand the difference between total carbs and net carbs. Total carbs represent the cumulative total of grams of dietary fiber, sugar, and sugar alcohol in a food item. Net carbs are the carbs that affect your blood sugar levels and are calculated by subtracting fiber from total carbs.
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Total Carbs - Fiber = Net Carbs
By focusing on net carbs, you gain a more direct understanding of how many carbs you need to eat to enter ketosis.
Why Use a Keto Calculator?
After learning about the keto diet and its fat-burning properties, you might wonder why a keto calculator is necessary. While simply cutting carbs can lead to weight loss, a keto calculator offers precision and helps you optimize your diet for specific goals.
Precision and Personalization
A keto calculator provides useful insight into your macros while on a keto diet. It considers individual factors like age, sex, height, weight, physical activity levels, and your specified goal of losing/maintaining/gaining weight. This personalization ensures that the recommendations are tailored to your unique needs.
Macro Tracking for Nutritional Ketosis
Macro counting can be beneficial if you aim for nutritional ketosis, whether for weight loss or other health goals. The single most important macro to track on keto is carbohydrates.
Achieving Specific Goals
Calculating macros that are tailored to your specific goal will tell you if you need to eat more calories, fewer calories, or keep your caloric intake as it is, in order to meet your goal. Maybe you want to build muscle. Bulking up requires getting keen on macros.
Read also: Keto Calorie Counting: A Detailed Guide
Ensuring Adequate Nutrition
Calculating macros ensures adequate nutrition. Maybe you’re not so good at estimating how much fat or protein is in a particular food. This may result in you not eating enough fat, for instance, and compromising your ketogenic ability. Not eating enough fat is actually one of the causes of keto flu-symptoms experienced by those just getting started on a ketogenic diet.
How the Keto Calculator Works
The keto calculator uses a sophisticated algorithm created using thousands of data points and hundreds of published research findings. Here's a breakdown of the key elements:
Mifflin-St. Jeor Formula
This calculator uses the Mifflin-St.Jeor Formula to find your BMR, which is among the most accurate formulas. Our keto calculator uses the Mifflin-St.Jeor Formula which was the most accurate (versus the Katch-McCardle Formula or the Harris-Benedict Formula) in a few studies. The Mifflin-St. Jeor equation accurately determines the ideal macros to help you reach your health goals.
Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR)
The BMR is simply a number of calories we burn while our bodies are at rest and from eating and digesting food. This will give us an idea of how much the minimum amount of calories your body will burn in a day. Our keto calculator uses this to calculate your Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR). Your basal metabolic rate (BMR) determines how many calories your body burns when resting.
Total Daily Energy Expenditure (TDEE)
Together BMR and activity level form what’s known as TDEE, or total daily energy expenditure. This is the keto calculator’s estimate for your total calories burned per day.
Read also: Magnesium Supplements for Keto
Lean Body Mass
Our keto calculator uses body fat percentage to calculate your lean body mass. Using this number, we’re able to calculate how much protein you need to sufficiently lose weight without losing excess muscle.
Activity Level
Your health and metabolism are largely affected by your activity level. The more active you are, the more calories your body burns. Knowing this helps our keto calculator determine how many calories you must consume each day to maintain or lose weight.
Calorie Deficit or Surplus
A deficit or surplus just relates to the number of calories you want to intake. A surplus means you are eating more than your body needs. A deficit means you are eating less than your body needs. Typically if you are losing weight, you want to have a deficit in calories. Typically if you want to gain muscle, you want to have a surplus in calories. You need extra calories if you want to put on lean mass.
Using the Keto Calculator: A Step-by-Step Guide
Using our free keto calculator is easy. Start by selecting imperial or metric units and your gender. Next, fill in your age, height, weight, and activity level. Then, enter your preferred amount of net carbs and protein. Finally, fill in your target weight to see your results.
- Input Your Information: Enter your sex, age, current weight, and height.
- Select Activity Level: Choose the activity level that best represents your average activity per day.
- Not much activity with little to no exercise.
- Daytime walking with less than 20 minutes exercise per day.
- A lightly active day job with physical labor or scheduled exercise.
- A very active day job.
- Set Your Goal: Define your objective: lose weight, gain weight, or maintain weight. Based on that goal, enter your desired caloric deficit or surplus.
- Body Fat Percentage and Protein Intake: If you know your body fat percentage, include it. And if you'd like to build LBM, you can input your desired protein intake.
- Review Your Results: Your results will show how many calories from fat, carbs, and protein you should consume each day to achieve your target weight.
Interpreting Your Results
When you get your free keto calculator results, they should look similar to this:Based on your inputs, the calculator will suggest a total daily calorie count with a breakdown of each macronutrient (fat, carbs, and protein) to help you meet your desired goal. Take a closer look at what each component on the keto calculator results mean.
Calories
Calories are essentially units of energy. They tell you how much energy you can expect from the food and beverages you consume.
Fat
On keto, the majority of your calories will come from dietary fat. If you aren’t losing weight while in ketosis, you may be consuming too much fat. Your body burns dietary fat before body fat. So, if you consume too much, your body will not tap into your fat reserves.
Carbohydrates
If you can’t seem to get into ketosis, it’s likely that you are still consuming too many carbohydrates. Generally, you want to stay under 50 grams of carbs daily on a keto diet. On Healthy Keto, we recommend not counting carbs that come from non-starchy vegetables. You need plenty of leafy green vegetables to stay healthy, so don’t limit your intake.
Protein
Protein is essential for maintaining and building muscle. However, if you aren’t a bodybuilder, you may not need as much as you think. Excessive protein consumption can spike insulin and glucose, making weight loss more difficult. Six ounces of protein with each meal is plenty for most people. Protein intake is imperative when it comes to keto. Too much and you can lower your ketone levels, too little and you can lose excess muscle. If you want to gain muscle, we recommend having between 1.0g and 1.2g protein per pound of lean body mass.
Tips for Meeting Your Macros
- Plan Your Meals: The easiest way to meet your protein needs is by making sure you are consuming a good protein source at each meal. Most keto dieters will be able to meet their protein needs with 2-3 keto meals that contain one or more of these protein sources. One, plan your meals ahead.
- Meal Prep: Two, do meal prep (including your snacks and packed office lunches).
- Combine High-Protein and High-Fat Foods: To meet your macros most efficiently, try combining high protein with high-fat foods or have foods that are both high in protein and fat at every meal. For example, having a fatty fish or fatty cut of meat with high-protein cheese (and low carb vegetables) is a simple and easy way to have a keto-friendly meal that will help you meet your protein and fat needs.
- Track Your Intake: To help you stay on track to meeting your macro needs, we recommend using a calorie tracking app like MyFitnessPal or Cronometer. You can also track net carbs by calculating them yourself and adding them up throughout the day.
Advanced Keto Calculator Features
The Advanced keto calculator is available to those who want to take it a step further by allowing you to further customize your results by manually entering your body fat percentage or fine-tuning your chosen macros for even more accuracy. Simply toggle the area within the calculator that you would like to fine-tune to access the advanced version.
Manual Body Fat Percentage Input
We recommend to manually input your body fat percentage only if you have obtained from direct testing using either a DXA, BodPod, or InBody analysis. Other home devices and handheld body fat analyzers are not as accurate and may affect your results. Select the option that fits your body type best. If you have actual body fat % measurements from a DXA, InBody, or BodPod, you can use the advanced calculator to input your number for a more accurate calculation.
DEXA scans are proven to be the most accurate measurement of body fat. They’re commonly available at gyms and some doctor offices when requested. If you don’t have access to this, you can always go the old-fashioned route and use a good quality caliper.
Fine-Tuning Macros
Advanced calorie cycling technology provides different calorie loads to suit you. Your results will be categorized into active days and rest days. In each box, you’ll see your daily recommended intake in grams of net carbs, protein, and fats. In other words, this is the recommended amount you should aim to consume each day to achieve your goals.
Common Concerns and Misconceptions
High Protein Intake
Even after you convert grams to calories, you may find that your suggested protein intake is high (above 30%) and fat is a bit low for keto (less than 60%). The only problem that high protein intake can cause, however, is lower levels of ketone production. Eating protein won’t kick you out of ketosis, contrary to what some may think. Gluconeogenesis is a demand-driven process. The belief that more protein automatically decreases ketones is based on the idea that protein stimulates insulin production. If you want to follow a high-protein keto diet, that means protein should replace fat as your primary source of calories. Consuming more protein while limiting carbohydrates helps you lose weight. This is because protein takes more energy to be digested due to its high thermic effect - you end up burning 20-30% of the calories you consume.
Calorie Counting
Generally speaking, many people are concerned that the keto calculator results in too many calories to eat. It’s very common for the average person to lose weight on a 1600 calorie a day keto diet. You should try to eat according to the macros given and try to spread your meals out during the day. Don’t worry about getting exact numbers to the tee.
The Importance of Food Quality
Also, remember that even if you’re using macros for weight loss, food quality still matters. Taking a clean keto approach will not only keep you in ketosis but also improve your health.
Clean Keto vs. Dirty Keto
The dirty lazy keto diet or “dirty keto,” as commonly called, is a keto version that allows for processed foods like cured meats, pork rinds, refined vegetable oils, diet soda, and restaurant foods. Some people do dirty keto for convenience and to satisfy their craving for pre-packaged foods (since they are often highly palatable). Those who choose dirty keto over clean keto should strive to eat processed foods free of sugars and harmful additives.
Keto-Friendly Foods
To start a ketogenic diet, you should reduce carbs to 30-50 grams per day and up your intake of healthy fats. We recommend clearing out all carb-heavy foods in your pantry and stocking up on keto-friendly items like meat, poultry, seafood, non-starchy vegetables, and nuts and seeds.
Tools for Tracking and Planning
Calorie Tracking Apps
To help you stay on track to meeting your macro needs, we recommend using a calorie tracking app like MyFitnessPal or Cronometer.
Keto Recipe Catalogs
Click on this link to check out our keto recipe catalog (with new keto recipes added every week). This will give you a good idea of what you can eat for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and dessert while you are keto dieting.
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