Once you’ve gotten to a weight where you feel happy, maintaining it is often the next big challenge. When you stop losing weight and you begin trying to close your deficit in order to find the right maintenance calorie goal for your body, it can get a little frustrating.
However, just because you’ve met your weight loss goals, that doesn’t mean you should stop working out. In addition to keeping your diet on track and making sure you eat healthy foods, you also need to stay active. You might not have to log as many hours in the gym any more, but movement is still an essential part of living a healthy lifestyle.
Walking is a fantastic activity to incorporate into your routine in order to help you stay moving and aid you in maintaining your current weight. But, figuring out how many steps you need to take in order to maintain your current weight is the trick.
In order to calculate how many steps you need to take each day in order to maintain your current weight, you need to start by calculating your maintenance calories. This is how many calories you need to consume each day in order to stay at your current weight. Some online calculators will allow you to enter in your height, age, weight, activity levels, and some other information in order to give you an estimate.
Based on this estimate, you’ll be able to begin adjusting your daily caloric intake to match. It’s best to slowly increase your intake from the amount you were eating to lose weight, raising it gradually in the coming weeks until you hit your maintenance calorie level. Let’s say the calculator tells you that you need to consume 2,000 calories every day to maintain your current weight.
It could be as simple as eating 2,000 calories or less so that you don’t gain any weight back, but remember, activity is still important to health. And, most people will want to eat a little more than the calculators sometimes allow them. For instance, you might want to eat 2,500 calories per day without gaining extra weight. In this case, you need to be burning 500 calories each day through activity in order to continue hitting your 2,000 net calorie maintenance goal.
Luckily, it’s simple. Find a calculator to see how many calories you burn in an hour of walking. If you burn 250 calories per hour of walking, you can eat 2,500 calories a day and walk 2 hours a day to maintain your current weight. It’s that easy!