BMR is becoming a very important tool as well as guide to helping people lose weight, but how do you use it? Let’s find out and if you’ve never heard of this term, you’re going to want to check this out.
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BMR: It’s definition and what it is:
BMR stands for Basal Metabolic Rate. While there are complex definitions for it, the simplest is that it’s a measurement of how many calories your body burns on a daily basis to sustain itself. This also includes the periods when you sleep because your body is always working no matter what’s happening 24-7.
What uses does BMR have?
By understanding what your unique BMR is, you can use that information to make a decision on how to lose weight , whether through dieting or in coloration with exercise.
For example, if you see that your BMR is say 2,000 calories a day, and you decide to lose weight only through dieting, you would have to eat under the 2,000 mark to achieve this.
But if you add exercise into the picture and considering you workout everyday and that workout burns 500 calories, you would have to technically eat more than the 2,000 mark, but then subtract the workout’s effect. This would allow you to still remain under your BMR.
How accurate is BMR? Well if you use the formula, it’s a very close estimate. There are special tests that can be done to measure the exact number.
How to calculate BMR:
Understand a few things:
1. BMR is different for men and women. There are separate formulas available to help measure this.
2. You can find the “close estimate” of your BMR by either using a formula created by OR better yet a calculator which already takes that formula into consideration. If you are/aren’t very athletic, you may want to also take your BMR and apply the Harris Benedict Formula to more accurately determine how many calories your body burns a day. Follow the link above and it will guide you through the process.
3. Your BMR number is reflected by your age, height and weight and can change for a number of reasons.
You may undertake a diet, lose weight and plan to keep your results for a long time. This would mean your BMR would be affected since your new weight is now added into the formula.
Or you may workout, put on more muscle or lose weight which would also affect your weight. Muscle weights more than fat which means if you gain weight but look bulkier, your BMR would go up because your weight would as well.
How to use BRM to lose weight:
Most theories and practices of diets and weight loss understandings revolve around the eat less, exercise more idea. Specifically in order to lose weight, you need to burn more calories than you consume. By doing so you lose weight.
Now when you add BMR into this, you have a very close if not exact estimate of you goal. As I mentioned earlier with my example, if my BMR says my body burns 2,000 calories a day, I’d have to eat less to lose weight. That’s really how you do it.
This is really something you should be careful with. Some people who need to lose weight right now tend to overdo these things in hopes of losing a lot of it quickly. They tend to go on starvation diets or cut out large amount of calories right away in hopes of getting those fast results. Most of the time, the best way to get going on a diet is to slowly transition into it rather than cutting out everything else cold turkey and going to extreme measures.
With regards to BMR however, what must also be included is how long it takes to burn away a pound which is 3,500 calories. Brian Flatt, creator of the 3 week diet uses this example to show that while BMR is a solution to help you lose weight via eating under your number, it’s also going to be slow in terms of results because of the large amount of calories you need to burn to reach even 1 pound.
To make this go faster, you can check out the 3 week diet plan which attacks this scenario in a 4 phase plan to get very fast results, or you can take the more traditional route, eat less and exercise more.