I am trying to lose weight, what is the best ratio of calories in versus calories out?

Lizzie R, this woman's Base Metabolic Rate is 1700 calories, so eating 1400 calories would put her body into starvation mode!

Your body burns calories even when you aren't doing anything, and that number is your BMR. In other words, given your height, weight, sex and age, a BMR calculator will show that you can burn 1700 calories just lying in bed all day. But that is unhealthy, and won't do a thing to build lean muscle and raise your metabolism (which will burn MORE calories when sleeping!).

Eat less than you burn, and you will lose weight. How much will be up to you, but a manageable rate is to burn 500 calories more per day, losing 1 lb per week. More than that, and you'll have to work out HARD or you'll starve yourself, leading to "little" snacks and binging that will wipe out your goals.

The easiest way to eliminate extra calories is to eat organic foods, stay away from fast food, and drink water or green tea instead of soda. Yes, even diet soda, which is full of chemicals instead of sugar!

If you don't have one, get a heart rate monitor. The Polar F6 is a nice one, and it's around $100. You need to work in different heart rate zones to get an effective workout, and you MUST vary your exertion from time to time. Your 45-min stepping is great, but some days you need to pick the pace up until you want to puke, then follow with a day so easy it feels like nothing.

Just stay away from fads, pills, elixirs, starvation, and McDonald's, know that permanent weight loss will NOT be two weeks away, and always keep your goal in mind.

If you have a negative balance of 500 calories a day, you will lose a pound a week.

You can do this with a combination of exercise and reduction in required caloric intake but don't let your caloric intake go below 1200 calories a day.

Step aerobics are good but you can increase your metabolism by 30-50 calories per hour with every pound of muscle that you have. Get some yoga and resistance exercises in there too.

At your weight right now, I would not lose anymore than 1 1/2 lbs a week.

When you get slimmer and in better shape then you can up your weight loss schedule but never lose no more that 2 1/2 lbs a week or 10 lbs. a month. Than is the healthiest way to lose weight.

There is a tracker on the first website that I will mention below. However, all three are good websites to have as tools and support for your weight lose efforts.

A dietitian or personal trainer can sit down with you and give you a much more personalized answer to this question but here's some ballpark numbers to get you started...

Your Basal Metabolic rate (calories you'd burn if you did nothing all day) is something like 1750 Cal. 45 minutes of aerobics is probably going to burn something like 300-400 Cal. Say your activities of daily living burn another 300 so you're looking at a daily expenditure of something like 2400 Calories.

If you burn 2400/day then you should try eating about 1900/day. That would lead to a weight loss of a pound per week in the long term (in the short term there are a lot of factors that can screw this up so don't get stressed if you don't drop a pound at the end of the first week... just stick with it and don't get discouraged)

Again this is really rough guesswork. It would definitely be a good idea to talk to a professional or get some library books that cover the topic in more depth.

try to burn at least 400 calories when you work out and eat about 1300 with lots of protein, fruits, vegetabes, but only a little bit of carbs.

put people on speakerphone and pace your office during conference calls

begin a walking regime