Ever heard the 80% Nutrition 20% Exercise rule? In other words, keeping a schedule of monitoring your food in 4 to 6 planned meals a day with a couple of hours exercising, which applies to both weight-gaining and losing strategies.
It becomes a little easy while gaining because regular exercise can boost body metabolism and hunger, resulting in eating more, to sum up, calories. However, most of us want to primarily lose some of that stubborn fat deposits at the stomach or elsewhere. And this is where the concept of calorie management is very important to understand.
Because, unless you take good command of your diet, it's nearly impossible to achieve the weight losing hustle just by exercising.
What is a Calorie?
Calorie means Energy. Just like Oxygen(which provides energy in the form of ATP), every living creature needs a certain amount of calories(energy in the form of heat) to sustain life. And those calories come from the nutrients present in our food.
In other words, a calorie(or kilocalorie) is a unit of heat energy(Cal or kcal) needed to raise the temperature of 1 unit .kg water by 1 degree Celsius. You might have heard about 'joule', another unit of energy that is used in physics. They keep a relation in between which is -
1 calorie = 4.18 Joule
A normal adult's body (male or female) requires a certain amount of calories from his/her food for proper body functionality and it also impacts our growth with unplanned gaining or losing weight. That's right. Too many calories in your diet increase the risk of gaining weight and won't let your belly fat go away until you control over it.
Further ahead, we are going to discuss how many calories you should consume in a day by understanding the concept of BMR(Basal Metabolic Rate).
Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR)
It is the amount of energy or calories needed in a day when the body is at complete rest with the digestive system fully inactive, which means if you don't eat anything all day, your body still needs these many calories for all the primary organs to function and keep you alive.
An adult male has a BMR of 1500 to 1800 calories per day whereas a female adult requires about 1400 to 1600 calories. According to the Harris-Benedict formula published in 1919 by the Carnegie Institute of Washington -
Put your values herein required units as mentioned :
Age (in years) :
Height (in cm) :
Weight (in kg) :
For example, I am a 26 years old male, with 5'11" height and 72 kgs of weight. So putting my details on the above formula, I get a total of 1783 Kcal which is my body's minimum energy requirement for a day when I don't move a muscle for the whole long day.
However, apart from anybody laying alone on a hospital bed, we people perform various jobs in a day including the basics like walking, talking, eating and much more. All these activities need some extra amount of energy in the form of calories to burn, from the food we consume.
How BMR helps you determine your Daily Calorie Needs?
After getting an idea of our BMR, we can averagely or dedicatedly control the required amount of calories we need for weight gaining or losing goals just by consuming more or fewer calories in a day than we burn in total. In the next part of the study, we shall observe and understand more about calculating calories in our food.
Afterward, we know the BMR value, the next step is to determine how many calories we burn in a day. That will help in evaluating the total energy expenditure by multiplying the BMR with a PAL factor (Physical Activity Level), suggested by Harris-Benedict duo -
Sedentary Active - Minimal or light exercise, multiply your BMR by 1.25
Moderately active - Moderate exercise schedule, 3 to 5 days a week, multiply your BMR by 1.5.
Very active - Tough exercise six to seven days a week, multiply your BMR by 1.75
Unstoppable - Extremely hard exercise, 7 days a week, multiply your BMR by 1.9.
Or you can simply use this equation -->
[Total Calorie Expenditure = BMR + Calories you burn in a day - total calories in your food/day ]
If the value comes positive, you are on a calorie deficit diet(you're consuming lesser calories than you burn in a day), which is going to help losing weight
If the value comes negative, that means you are bulking up, consuming extra calories that may increase your weight.
In the next part, we will be discussing how many calories are subjected to how much bodyweight gain or loss. In addition, we will go through a full diet plan with calorie deficit and bulking goals and their effects on time, and the amount of dedication we decide to put in the process.
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