Maintaining a balanced diet can feel like a maths problem. Senior Dietitian Victoria Taylor explains how many calories you should eat a day, how many calories you need to lose weight, and how to achieve a balanced diet.
What's on this page:
- How many calories should I eat in a day?
- How many calories should I eat to lose weight?
- Foods to subtract - daily reference intakes
- Foods to eat more of
- Achieving a balanced diet
Healthy eating can feel like a numbers game – especially if you’re trying to remember the limits for fat, sugar and salt, whilst also getting your five portions of fruit and veg, two portions of fish a week, and a certain number of calories!
While the guidance can be helpful, you don’t have to focus on the numbers. Remember that your individual requirements will vary, as they will depend on your weight, age, health, how active you are and other factors. Plus, hardly any of us are so routine in our diets and lifestyles that we eat and do the same things every day throughout the year.
Rather than trying to stick rigidly to a set amount of nutrients or calories, use the guidelines as a rule of thumb and to provide reassurance that you’re on the right track.
Want to get fit and healthy?
Sign up to our fortnightly Heart Matters newsletter to receive healthy recipes, new activity ideas, and expert tips for managing your health. Joining is free and takes two minutes.
How many calories should I eat in a day?
It’s estimated that the average man should be eating 2,500kcals a day, or 2,000kcals for a woman, which gives us an idea of roughly where our intake of energy needs to be. Some days you might eat more and others less - it’s the average that is important rather than individual days. How much exercise you do will probably vary too, so your energy needs and appetite are likely to vary as well.
You can find tools online that will give you a more tailored idea of your calorie needs. But most of us don’t need to be that precise. You might have heard that calories don’t matter anyway – and there is some truth in this. We need to focus on where our energy comes from and our whole diet rather than simply how much we are taking in.
Keeping an eye on your weight will give you an indication of whether you are eating the right amount, without the need to count calories. If you’re not keen on weighing yourself regularly, or don’t have any scales, using a tape measure to measure your waist will also help to show whether you’re putting on weight. Keeping an eye on how your clothes are fitting works too. You don’t need to weigh yourself every day, unless you have been advised to by your doctor or nurse. Generally, small day-to-day changes on the scales are not a concern – it’s the trend over the course of a month that matters. (If you’re living with heart failure, see page 35 for information about sudden weight gain.)
For most people body mass index (BMI) will give you an idea of whether you’re a healthy weight.
How many calories should I eat to lose weight?
If you need to lose weight generally, a reduction of 500-600kcals per day will help you to achieve a 1-2lb/0.5-1kg weight loss per week. Cutting down on foods like cakes, crisps, biscuits and chocolate and replacing them with healthier options will reduce calories, and just as importantly will mean less saturated fat, salt and sugar in your diet. This will help your heart health on top of any weight loss you achieve.
Combining food and exercise changes is the best approach. When it comes to exercise, using 500-600kcal would mean, for example, around an hour of aerobics or cycling, or two hours of walking or vacuuming. So losing weight through exercise alone is difficult. More importantly, being active is good for your heart health and your mental health. So find exercise that you enjoy, and the calories you burn will be a bonus.
Being a healthy weight can help you to feel better and will benefit your heart health as well as cutting your risk of cancer and other diseases.
Foods to subtract – daily reference intakes
Reference intakes (RI) provide a guide to the maximum amounts of certain nutrients in our diet, like fat, sugars, salt and saturated fat. They used to be called ‘guideline daily amounts’. On food packets these tell you what percentage of the RI a portion of the product will provide. They can be useful to help you understand what a portion of the food will add to your diet and keep track of what you are eating.
These are the daily reference intakes for adults:
- Energy: 2000kcals
- Total fat: less than 70g
- Saturated fat: less than 20g
- Total sugars (from milk, fruit and vegetables as well as added sugar): less than 90g
- Free sugars: (added sugar or in juice) less than 30g
- Salt: less than 6g
For a quicker check, the traffic light colour coding can tell you at a glance if the product is high, medium or low in fat, saturated fat, salt or sugar per 100g. Try to mainly choose foods that have green traffic lights, with some amber and just a few reds.
When it comes to free sugars (any sugar, honey or syrup that is added to food or drink or found naturally in fruit juice), the limit is 30g a day (the equivalent of 7.5 teaspoons of sugar). That might sound a lot, but most people in the UK consume more than that, mainly because of sugar we add, such as to cereal, tea and coffee, as well as biscuits, buns, pastries, chocolate and sweets and sugary drinks. Salt limits are set at a maximum of 6g a day, which is about a teaspoon.
Foods to eat more of
Most of us should eat more of certain foods to meet government guidelines – at least five portions of fruit and vegetables a day (a portion of fresh fruit or veg is 80g), and 1-2 portions (140g per portion) of fish a week, one of which is oily. Generally, we’re not eating enough of these foods - can you think of ways you could add more of them, while having a varied and healthy balanced diet?
It’s likely that you’re not getting enough fibre either, as most of us aren’t reaching the 30g a day that’s recommended. Good sources of fibre are fruit and vegetables as well as beans, lentils, nuts and seeds. Wholegrains are also important and easy to include in your diet by switching from white bread, rice, pasta and breakfast cereals to granary or wholemeal bread, brown rice, whole wheat pasta and wholegrain breakfast cereals (without added sugar).
Achieving a balanced diet
Rather than focusing on single foods and nutrients, try taking a whole diet approach which will help to make sure you get the best balance of nutrients in your diet. Eating this way will make sure we get the right balance of fat, protein and carbohydrate in our diet as well as the vitamins and minerals we need to keep us healthy.
