How Many Calories Is One Pound Of Fat

How Many Calories Is One Pound Of Fat?

How many calories is one pound of fat? I have always wondered this, we always hear about gaining or losing pounds but how much is that in terms of daily calories?

There is apparently a lot of debate on this topic, in fact if you try to search for this you'll find different answers on nearly every different site. This confused the crap out of me when all I wanted was a simple answer!

The simple answer: one pound of fat is roughly 3,555 kcal. (calories)

The longer answer:

1) One pound has 454 grams2) An extremely rough estimate (so rounded that it's not to be used for scientific purposes) is fat has 9 calories per gram.3) Fat tissue in humans contains roughly 87% lipids (another rough estimate).This means that 454 grams of your fat tissue has roughly the calories of 395 grams of pure fat (454g x 0.87), this equals 3,555 kcal. (395g x 9)However basing your weigh gain or loss over the year on this number is not going to be near accurate enough. The problem is everyone is different and the numbers have been rounded by a significant amount. But for settling your curiosity 3,555 calories is in a pound. However losing weight is done on a daily basis, if you reduce your food intake by 100 kcal on a daily basis you will lose weight over the year.

How Many Calories Must You To Burn To Lose One Pound Of Fat?

Now that we know how many calories are in a pound this doesn't mean that's how much you'll need to workout to lose it. Your body doesn't work in absolutes like that. It will actually take you burning more calories than 3,555 to lose a pound.In fact you might need to burn twice as many!Recent health data has possibly indicated that you have to burn around 7,000 calories for each pound of fat that you want to get rid of.Kevin Hall who is a mathematician, contributed to the research. Our body doesn't work like that. Using a one size fits all random benchmark is useless. Trying to figure out exactly how many calories you'll need to burn depends on a multitude of factors not limited to: individual body type, fat location, natural metabolism, typical diet, etc.In my opinion it is a waste of time to do an exact calculation, the best and simplest way to lose weight is just consume less than you burn. And over time you will shed the pounds but you wont get a headache trying too figure everything out.

So take this into your calories counting calculations! Don't forget that not all calories are created equal, read more about this in my calorie counting post.

Here is a Quick Video About Calories in a Pound