How to Calculate your BMR
Recently I have been struggling with the idea of daily caloric intake. This is of vital importance to all of us because it resides at the epicenter of our national confusion regarding weight gain and loss.
The argument goes like this: If you consume less calories than you spend you will lose weight, that’s it end of story and Weight Watchers has been successfully using this strategy for years.
The other side of the story goes like this. It is all about the quality of calories you consume and some have even reported (I have heard a famous trainer tell this story in person) clients consuming 7000 calories a day and not getting fatter. In other words if you eat correctly you can eat as much as you want.
So what is true really?
Well the weight watchers philosophy is true and the quality is also true depending on your goals and desires. The problem with just trying to lowball your caloric intake and not attempt to nourish your body is that you will surely lose muscle before you lose fat. You end up with what we call skinny fat. You fit into small clothes but you are weak and flabby.
The reason why is your body hates muscle and loves fat. So much so that when you decrease the amount of calories you are eating your body uses muscle for fuel not fat. Muscle is expensive, it costs calories to maintain so when your body thinks that there isn’t enough food it will spend the muscle tissue for fuel and conserve fat at all costs.
However if you are concerned with how you look and feel then you will want to take a quality approach and feed your body healthy nutrients to ensure that you get the most out of your exercise program. This is the philosophy that delivers long term results. All it requires is that you know a few things about yourself in order to truly succeed.
You absolutely must have an idea of how many calories you burn at rest and how many calories you burn in a day. If you can figure out these numbers than you can easily figure out how many calories to eat in a day and what amount of those calories should be made of lean protein. Ready to start? all you will need is a pen and paper.
Step 1:
Take your current body weight in pounds (lbs) and multiply by 11.
Example: 135 lbs x 11 = 1485 calories
This is what you need to just keep what you have, without moving. But remember, you do move. So you have to then calculate your metabolic factors into this