At rest how many calories a day

This formula calculates your basal metabolic rate BMR , which is the number of calories your body needs to function at rest. With one more calculation, you can work out how many calories you need each day to maintain your current weight. Eating fewer calories than this will result in weight loss.

It is important to note that while calorie intake and exercise are an important part of weight loss, hormones and metabolism also play a major role. The Harris-Benedict formula, or Harris-Benedict equation, lets you work out how many calories you need to eat per day. The formula is adjusted based on your sex, age, and weight to give a personalized answer.

This equation was first published in Researchers then revisited the calculation in and again in to improve its accuracy. Once you work out your BMR, you can multiply this figure by a measure of your daily activity level — ranging from sedentary to extra active — to find out the number of calories you need to consume each day to maintain your weight.

The next sections will tell you how to do these calculations. The original formulas for calculating this number are as follows, using pounds for weight, inches for height, and years for age.

For example, a year-old, pound, 6-foot-tall man has a BMR of 1, For example, a year-old, pound, 5 foot 6-inch-tall woman has a BMR of 1, From there, you must figure out your activity level. The activity levels the equation uses are as follows :. For example, a postal worker who walks all day for their job would have an activity level of 1.

A desk worker who walks several times a week for exercise would have an activity level of 1. As you can see in the above examples, activity level has a lot to do with how many calories a person needs each day.

How are these numbers calculated exactly? Metabolism is a process by which the body converts food into energy for use in daily activities. Even keeping your organs running, breathing, and circulating blood costs your body calories. This includes sleeping and sitting. To calculate your BMR , you use an equation that factors in your sex, weight, and age using inches for height and pounds for weight.

Men tend to burn more calories at rest than women of the same weight because men typically have higher muscle mass. Muscle burns more calories at rest than fat does. Want to maximize your calorie torching in the overnight hours? A recent study uncovered that if you skip an entire night of sleep, you may actually burn an extra calories over that period of time. Some participants burned as many as an extra calories. Sleep loss over time may contribute to weight gain and obesity.

It elevates certain hormone levels in the body, like cortisol. This hormone makes you hold onto extra fat. Not only that, but it may also increase your appetite and lead to a slower metabolism.

What may help you burn more calories during sleep is taking measures to elevate your metabolism. Here is part of the reason why I think many of us are overweight; it's very easy to do nothing or close to it without even realizing it, and we very rarely are conscious enough of our activity levels to adjust our diets to reflect the small number of calories we are burning.

For example, consider the recommendation of taking a minimum of 10, steps a day. The average adult woman is 5 feet 4 inches tall and weighs lbs, while the average man is 5 feet 10 inches tall and weighs lbs. Yet age, activity level, body size, and body composition all influence how many calories a person burns through each day.

To get a more accurate idea of your daily caloric requirements, you can turn to an online metabolic rate calculator. These determine basal metabolic rate BMR , which refers to the number of calories that the body burns every day for energy just to maintain basic biological functions.

When multiplied by an activity factor how much you move in a day , you get your daily metabolic rate, an estimate of how many calories you actually burn in 24 hours — and how many calories you need to eat every day just to keep your weight constant, says Sari Greaves , a registered dietitian nutritionist at LBS Nutrition in East Brunswick, New Jersey, and the author of Cooking Well Healthy Kids.

But using such a calculator, while more accurate than calculators that do not take into account your body fat versus lean mass will require that you have a tool like calipers those fat pinchers your doctor may have used on you in the past or a smart scale to estimate your body composition. Once you know your current daily caloric requirement, you can create your own formula for losing weight.

Simply put, as long as you are eating fewer calories than that number, or you increase your daily caloric burn with exercise, you will lose weight, explains Audra Wilson, RD, CSCS, a bariatric dietitian and strength and conditioning specialist at the Northwestern Medicine Metabolic Health and Surgical Weight Loss Center at Delnor Hospital in Geneva, Illinois.

For example, you might eat fewer calories, work off more calories through exercise, or do any combination of the two actions to achieve a deficit of calories. For example, you might choose to eat calories fewer than your daily caloric requirement and then do a workout that burns another calories, she says. In terms of the 3,calorie rule, that would mean that if you achieve that calorie deficit at the end of each day, you would lose 1 lb of fat in seven days.

While the math is complicated, the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, one of the top nutrition research centers in the United States, has created a weight loss predictor to help you more closely estimate how much weight you would lose with a given daily calorie deficit. It uses mathematical models based on your age, height, weight, and biological sex, as well as the size of your daily caloric deficit. It also provides an estimate of how many calories you need to maintain your body weight and likely are consuming right now.

The size of your caloric deficit affects how fast you lose weight, with larger deficits leading to faster weight loss. Yet experts typically agree that losing 2 lbs per week is the healthiest and most sustainable pace of weight loss , Wilson explains. If you are losing more than that in a given week, it is likely that you are significantly cutting into your lean muscle mass. By lowering your metabolic rate, this sets you up to eventually regain all of the weight you lost, and possibly then some.