BMR Calculators and losing or maintaining weight

I’ve been reading a lot of blog postings and listening to several audio podcasts related to weight loss and health, and on several occasions over the past week, they have all talked about your BMR, or Basal Metabolic Rate. This is the amount of energy your body would expend (in calories) just going about its normally business of functioning. It doesn’t take into account any type of activity level, but is simply a baseline of your energy expenditures. As I’ve mentioned before in this blog, if you take in fewer calories than your body expends, you’ll lose weight; if you take in more, you’ll gain. The equation looks simple, but in fact, either factor could and does change - you could take in the same amount of calories, and your body may adapt and slow down its metabolism, so you won’t need as much energy, and you’ll gain. It’s frustrating, of course, but throwing exercise into the equation can help put the odds in your favor.

So what exactly does exercise do? Well, for one thing, depending on the exercise you do, your body will continue to burn calories and use energy beyond the 30-40 minutes you spend in the gym. Why? Because every time you exercise, you are in effect creating little tiny tears in your muscles, and these tears need to be repaired. This restoration process requires energy, and that energy is provided either by the food you eat, or by excess fat stores on your body. This little tears, and the repairs that follow, are what cause your muscles to grow and gain strength.

There are several different BMR calculators out on the Internet - do a Google search on ‘BMR Calculator,’ and you’ll come up with over 100,000 pages. I like the one at preventdisease.com, because it not only gives you your BMR, but it can also estimate your AMR, Active Metabolic Rate, which includes the amount of exercise you do into the equation.

Take a look at one of these calculators, and let me know what you think. For those of you who count calories faithfully, this is the other side of the equation, and should give you a good sense on whether or not those calories you’re counting are working for you or against you.