Helpful Weight Loss Calculators

This past week has been a very good diet week. I was very active last week, exercising six out of seven days and followed my meal plans fairly well. The only falter was a few drinks on Friday and Saturday, which I regret because they add so many empty calories to my diet, but at the same time I enjoyed myself and really felt like I was getting a treat. Sometimes a treat is necessary, especially when I am always so focused on what I cannot eat or drink. It keeps me sane.

At this morning’s weekly weigh in my weight was…

207 lbs

Yes, I’m very happy with a weight loss of four pounds last week. I really worked hard for it too. I am now back to where I was before my vacation, now over six weeks ago. Since then I have lost 7 lbs towards reaching my goal of losing 44 lbs in four months. I’m almost a quarter of the way there.

There are a number of weight loss calculators you can use to make all kinds of estimates, such as calculating your basal metabolic rate or your body fat percentage.

I was recording my new body fat percentage this morning (which is 31%, still on the high end of the scale) and thought it would be helpful to describe the number of free and helpful weight loss calculators that are available for everyone to use. Weight loss calculators are meant to provide you with a better understanding of your current weight, physical condition and your potential risk for weight-related health problems.

There are many helpful weight loss calculators online. These calculators can give estimates of your BMI (Body Mass Index), daily calorie needs, how many calories you burn during exercise and much, much more. The only word of caution that goes along with using these calculators is that the values they calculate are estimates only. Because weight loss calculators cannot take into consideration how much muscle your body has, your bone density or the speed of your metabolism, sometimes the values they give can be off from the true amount. Take the results of weight loss calculators as estimates only and then use your own common sense to figure out if the values are accurate or not.

BMI Calculator – This can tell you where you are when you start your diet and where you are as you go down in weight. You typically enter your height and weight to get your BMI or body mass index. This number tells you about your current state of health and your body fat. If you register at 30 or more, for example, you are in the area of being quite overweight or obese. You can also find out if you are underweight, healthy weight, or overweight. Try out Weight Loss Center’s BMI Calculator for free.

Body Fat Calculator – The body fat calculator will provide you with an estimate of your body fat percentage based on your gender, weight and waist size. For those of us who are an average frame and build, the body fat calculator can be fairly accurate. However, for those people with a large frame and/or have a large amount of muscle, body fat calculators will likely over-estimate body fat percentage. Try out Weight Loss Center’s Body Fat Calculator for free.

Healthy Weight Calculator – The Healthy Weight Calculator is a helpful weight loss calculator that provides an estimate of what your healthy weight should be. This is a very simple tool and can be useful when setting a weight loss goal. However, if you have a lot of weight to lose, setting a smaller weight loss goal for yourself is probably a better idea. Try out Weight Loss Center’s Healthy Weight Calculator for free.

Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) Calculator – This handy weight loss calculator will give you an estimate of what your basal metabolic rate is according to your gender, age, weight and height. Your BMR is how many calories your body expends just performing basic functions, such as keeping your heart beating, your lungs breathing, your stomach digesting and so on. Hypothetically, if you consume as many calories as your BMR requires each day, then any other physical activity, such as walking, grocery shopping and working out will create a calorie deficit that will force your body to burn body fat. Try out Weight Loss Center’s BMR Calculator for free.

Daily Calorie Intake Calculator – The Daily Calorie Intake Calculator is one weight loss tool I would recommend to anyone who is new to dieting and not sure how many calories they should be eating to lose weight. This calculator uses your gender, height, weight, age and exercise level to determine an estimate of how many calories your body burns each day. By simply subtracting 500 calories from the estimate of your daily calorie intake you will cause a calorie deficit of 3500 calories a week, which is a potential weight loss of 2 to 3 pounds a week. Try out Weight Loss Center’s Daily Calorie Intake Calculator for free.

Calorie Calculators – These can be used to keep tabs on all of the calories that you put into your body each day. This helps you decide if you are on the right track or not, or where you can cut down if you are taking in too much. Some of these are more complicated than others, so find one that works the best for you. Some have extensive lists of foods so all you have to do is find the food and enter the portion that you ate and it puts the right calories in for you. Others are not as extensive but are still useful. I just started using FitDay.com’s diet tracker for making all these calorie calculations (see my post “Best Online Diet Trackers“), but look around and find what works best for you.

Exercise Calculators – These work much like calorie calculators, but instead they keep track of how many calories you burn each day rather than how many you ingest. You can add the numbers on your own, but many will ask you for the type of exercise, your weight, and for how long you worked out. It then automatically tells you how much you burned and you can then see if you are getting what you need or improving if you are working your way up to a higher impact workout. Try out Weight Loss Center’s Activity Calorie Calculator for free.

Dieting Calculators – There are some weight loss calculators that you can find which help you set a goal before you put the other calculators into use. You can enter height and weight, and then how much weight you want to lose. You can enter pounds or percentage to get some advice on caloric intake and exercise outlines.