You and Your BMR

Discuss tips and advice for losing body fat.

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gapage
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Joined: Thu Aug 07, 2014 1:08 pm

You and Your BMR

Post by gapage »

What is your basal metabolic rate and why should you care? Most people have never heard of the term but understanding your BMR is key to losing unwanted weight and keeping it off. So, what exactly is BMR? According to the ISSA basal metabolic rate is the minimum energy required to maintain the body’s life function at rest. Usually expressed in calories per hour per square meter of body surface.
Sound complicated? It really isn’t. Basically, your BMR is how many calories your body burns when lying down but not sleeping. Why is it important to know such a thing?

The BMR is required to understand your daily caloric needs. Once you know your BMR, it is added to the caloric consumption required to participate in all your other activities performed through a 24-hour period. For example; BMR is 2228 calories. daily activity level (which in case falls within the moderate range) added together with BMR leaves me with a total daily caloric expenditure of 3676 calories.

You might be asking, “OK that’s great to know, but what good will it do me?” Remember that the only sound way to shed weight or body fat is to burn more calories than you consume. Now that I know daily caloric requirement for an average day, this number can be the rock that I build fitness and nutritional foundation upon. Not knowing it is simply guessing.

So, what exactly is a calorie and how many do you need to burn in order to lose weight? A calorie is the approximate amount of energy needed to raise the temperature of one gram of water by one degree Celsius. As you are already aware, everything you eat or drink is measured by calories. How many of these calories do you have to burn in order to lose a pound, or how many healthy calories do you need to add in order to gain desired weight? Most schools of thought on this issue use the number 3500. Of course this will vary from person to person but 3500 is a pretty safe average. In other words, you must be in a caloric deficit of 3500 calories in order to shed a pound.

Be careful when trying to determine your BMR. There are a lot of web sites out there that will ask for you to enter some personal data such as height, age, and weight into a calculator. These are not true BMR calculations. In order to determine a precise BMR, body fat measurements need to be performed and applied to your calculations. Understandably, the caloric needs of a 200 pound athlete with 12% body fat are a great deal different than that of a 200 pound sedentary with 24% body fat.

If you don’t know your BMR already I suggest visiting with a fitness or health professional for the purpose of determining your personal BMR. Having this knowledge in hand will help you design a fitness program
tailored to your exact needs.
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