How to use your basal metabolic rate to track your daily calories

Deciding what your daily calorie intake is plays a big role in how effectively you lose weight. If you eat too many calories, you won’t lose weight. If you eat too little, your body’s metabolism will slow down, and as a result, it will try to retain more calories than you take in.

To decide how many calories to eat each day, it’s best to start with your Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR). As a reminder, your BMR is the minimum amount of dietary energy you need to digest to maintain your current state if you were to sit still all day.

Given this fact, any movement you make, however small, will result in burning fat. Of course, this is exactly what you need to do to lose weight. Plus, when you include any type of exercise in your daily activities, the faster you’ll burn fat.

Why use your BMR?

Some might think that it’s not necessary to use your basal metabolic rate as a guide for tracking your daily calories. It’s just as easy to limit yourself to 1,200 to 1,500 calories a day. This would be fine if we were all the same. However, this one-size-fits-all diet mentality may work for some, but for most they will need something else to fit their lifestyle more closely.

For example, the BMR for a 5-foot-5, 25-year-old woman who weighs 170 pounds is 1,582 calories. However, for a man of the same height and weight, her BMR is 1780 calories. So if they were both on a diet eating only 1500 calories per day, the man should lose more weight since he is further away from his BMR.

So by using your BMR, you can get a better estimate of how many calories you need to eat each day to lose weight, helping to take the guesswork out of deciding how many calories to eat. Furthermore, you can also use it as a guide to determine how fast to lose weight.

Should your daily calorie intake stay within your BMR?

Since consuming the calories derived from your BMR will allow you to lose weight, it’s a good place to start your diet. However, you can go below your BMR calorie intake to burn fat faster. The only precaution you need to take is to make sure you don’t let your body go into starvation mode.

Since everyone’s metabolism is different, there’s no set point at which you know for sure that you’re in starvation mode. However, it’s generally accepted that as long as you’re getting at least 1,200 calories a day, you should be fine.

Once you’ve been dieting for a week at your BMR, you can assess your weight to see if you need to add calories to slow it down or subtract calories to lose more quickly.

Also, since your BMR changes with your weight, the value you get a month from now will be different than the value you get today if you lost, say, 10 pounds during that time. By taking this fluctuating value into account, you can adjust your calorie intake accordingly and avoid entering a weight loss plateau.

Calculate your basal metabolic rate

To calculate your BMR to track your daily calories, you can use this BMR calculator. Remember, however, that this is only a guide for determining your calorie intake. After a week, evaluate your progress and make any necessary changes.