It is a fact that not everyone requires the same amount of sustenance to get through the day. There are many factors that determine your own caloric needs and they will be greatly different from the caloric needs of your friends and family members. When you discover the amount of calories your body needs, you can manage your weight and reach your health goals.
Your Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR). Everyone’s caloric needs will be slightly different from those of other people. You will need to use the Harris-Benedict principle also known as Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) to figure out how many calories you burn on any given day. Basic bodily functions like breathing use up around 60% of daily caloric needs. The balance is used up by simple movements like walking to and from your desk at work.
A different formula is used to calculate BMR for women and men.
For women: 655 + (4.3 x your weight in pounds) + (4.7 x your height in inches) – (4.7 x years of age).
For men: 66 + (6.3 x your weight in pounds) + (12.9 x your height in inches) – (6.8 x your years of age).
Please note: 1 inch = 2.54 cm, and 1 kg = 2.2 pounds
With the above formula and your own details inserted, you should end up with a number between 1200 and 2000. This number will be the number of calories your body needs daily to maintain your weight – this assumes that no exercise is done.
Daily activity. It is important to take into account any daily activity when working out your caloric needs. Greater levels of physical activity will burn more calories than being less active. If you just want to maintain your current weight, you need to work out the number calories burned when exercising so that you can add it to your daily caloric needs.
The guide below gives a rough idea according to your lifestyle:
Sedentary (non-active) lifestyle: BMR x 20%
Light activity: BMR x 30%
Moderate activity: BMR x 40%
Very active: BMR x 50%
Extremely active: BMR x 60%
Just as a guide, moderate activity means exercising nearly every day; very active is exercising intensely every day; athletes and those who do manual work are put in the extremely active category.
Total your daily activity and BMR together. Once you have got your BMR and your daily exercise amount, sum the two figures together. The number you get will be the number of calories you may consume every to maintain the weight you are right now.
Therefore simple eat fewer calories than your daily caloric intake requires if you want to reduce your weight – but 1200 calories per day is the minimum you have to consume). In contrast, the addition of a few hundred calories to your diet daily will help you achieve a weight gain.
Tiffany Provost writes about calorie and health tips for HowToDoThings.com.