Most people don’t know how many calories their body’s need in an average day. As a consequence, many people consume far more calories than they need each day without even realizing it. Healthy weight management is dependent upon balancing food calories, which comprise the quantity of energy that you feed into your body and how much activity you have or the amount of energy you burn off. Of course, this will vary from person to person depending on weight, size, BMI, and age.
Instructions
Evaluate Your Daily Calorie Needs
1. Understand the three main factors that make up your body's use of energy: metabolic rate, the thermic effect of food and energy that you expend in the course of physical activity. With these three components, you can accurately figure out how many calories your body needs every day.
2. Get to know your metabolic rate. The majority of your body's energy (about seventy percent) will go to maintaining the ongoing metabolic function of all of your body's organs and cells. This includes physical activities such as breathing, your heart beat, digestion, maintaining body temperature and even thinking. To determine your BMR, for adult males and females: multiply your body weight by 10, and then add double your body weight to the result.
3. Calculate the Thermic Effect of Food. This factor in the metabolic equation is based on how your body digests the food that you eat. Digestion of food itself requires and increase in energy, this type of energy is known as the thermic effect of food (TEF) and it is relatively easy to calculate. TEF = total kcals consumed x 10% [i.e., 2,000 kcals consumed/day x 0.10 = 200 kcals expended for TEF].
4. Calculate the energy you expend during physical activity. This component is variable depending on how much physical activity you get each day. Physical activity has a dramatic effect on your body’s overall use of energy. It uses up around thirty percent.
Tags: your body, physical activity, body energy, body weight, Calorie Needs, consumed kcals