Your Basal Metabolic Rate

The Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) is the starting point for understanding the “burning more calories than you are taking in” theory.

The BMR is the number of calories that your body will burn in a 24 hour period without any exercise or activity. It drops off as you age and that’s one reason it’s harder to keep weight off as you get older.

Active Metabolic Rate

This is a more practical measure to use when trying to figure and plan your caloric intake. You can use this process to take the guesswork out of weight management.

For some of my coaching clients eating less food isn't something they will choose to do. So what we work on is figuring out how much more exercise they need to raise their AMR so they can maintain, lose or gain weight to achieve their goals.

What a concept – exercise combats weight gain. Using this information in a systematic manner, will take much of the guesswork out of managing your weight successfully.

For a 52 year old male, 6’0” and 175 pounds (that’s me by the way :), the Basal Metabolic Rate is 1735 calories per day. If I burn another 500 calories during the day with my activities/exercises that is 2235.

If I want to maintain a weight of 175 pounds then I try and consume about that number of calories per day. There are approximately 3500 calories in a pound.

If you want to lose a pound of weight in a week, you need to burn 3500 more calories in a week than you consume.

At the following link you can put in your age, height, weight, and activity levels to get a rough guestimate of your AMR.

Active Metabolic Rate

A pretty simple concept, but take a common sense approach.

You also can’t treat this as just a math problem. Eating too few calories (besides being unhealthy) can trigger your body’s starvation defense to kick in. This is said to happen when you drop below 1200 calories per day.

If your body believes that it is being starved it will hold on to it’s fat reserves in a survival instinct. When it believes that times are good (when it's being fed good nutrition often) it will release fat.

As always, eating healthy, natural foods, will serve you and your health much more than processed foods (which are generally nutrition free :). Real food also fills you up and satisfies your hunger.

You can eat non-nutritional food constantly and still be hungry. When this happens, your body is telling you that it is short of its nutritional needs and still sends you hunger signals.

You end up eating way too many calories, you don’t meet your nutritional needs, and you end up still wanting more.

Would anyone like more chips???

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Return from Basal Metabolic Rate to The Glycemic Index