Someone PLEASE Explain Calories To Me!!

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  • waldo56
    waldo56 Posts: 1,861 Member
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    To be honest, no one really knows the answer to those questions. It has been proven time and again that calories in minus calories burned does not always equal weight loss or weight gain.

    What?

    Show some of where this apparently has been proven time and time again.

    This always works within the confines of reasonable; too big of a deficit and your body combats the loss with stress hormones and downshifting metabolism, too close to maintence and your body will modulate your metabolism to match your intake. Outside of those conditions, if loss isn't predicably occurring, the estimate for non-exercise TDEE (basically BMR*C), calories in, and/or calories out is wrong and needs adjusting.

    When your estimates for food and exercise cals are good and you've got the correct non-exercise TDEE, and you have a reasonable deficit, you should lose pretty much precisely what you expect to lose.
  • deksgrl
    deksgrl Posts: 7,237 Member
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    The confusion here is the use of the term BMR.

    BMR is the minimum your body needs, if you were in a coma, this is how many calories they would feed you.

    This website calculates your BMR but then it asks you what your activity level is. That is BMR PLUS more calories to fuel your daily activity. But it is still calling it BMR here.
  • waldo56
    waldo56 Posts: 1,861 Member
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    The confusion here is the use of the term BMR.

    BMR is the minimum your body needs, if you were in a coma, this is how many calories they would feed you.

    This website calculates your BMR but then it asks you what your activity level is. That is BMR PLUS more calories to fuel your daily activity. But it is still calling it BMR here.

    Yes, BMR is used interchangeably between sources to mean either:
    The amount of calories you'd burn in a coma
    -or-
    The amount of calories you burn each day that are not exercise

    You have to know which definition of BMR the source you are reading is using, because they are very different values.

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