Another BMR question

austi_t

I'm sure this is gonna turn in to a huge debate but I'm curious to see what the majority has to say, so here's my situation

I know for a fact my BMR is 1655 which means that as long as I eat 11,585 calories a week then I'm getting the basic amount of calories needed for my to sustain itself. But this is where I get confused, if I exercise lets say 3-4 times a week for a half hour, are those calories burned the deficit and this depending on how many calories I burn throughout the week exercising then that's my caloric deficit for the week?

P.s let's say the 3 days I exercise ill eat 1850 cal and the four rest days ill eat 1500 calls then ill still meet my weeky BMR goal.

So will this work to lose weight?

nphect

your bmr is what you burn if you layed in bed all day, and i doubt you do that.

use this

http://www.freedieting.com/tools/calorie_calculator.htm

and use (little/no exercise), then do fat loss or extreme fat loss depending on what you want to do, and whenever you exercise eat those calories you exercised in addition.

WinnerVictorious

yes, there is some confusion about these terms here because not everyone understands the underlying math, so they often post incorrect info.

here's what's going on.

laying in bed asleep all day, your MAINTENANCE calories would be your BASE BMR

however, if you don't lay in bed all day, but actually go to work and continue to move about doing everyday things, but not including any specific exercise that you do above and beyond that, then you modify your BASE BMR to get a DAILY BMR using the Harris Benedict Equation (or something similar).

in essence this multiplies your BASE BMR by some factor based on how much normal daily activity you have. if you work a desk job, you can use 1.2x as the multiplier. this is for SEDENTARY people. if you are more active than that (e.g. postman walking his route every day), then there are higher multipliers to use.

i personally think it's too confusing and inaccurate to try to include extra exercise in this step, so i don't. i calculate my BASE BMR and multiply by 1.2 to get my DAILY BMR. that's how many calories i need to maintain my weight just going about my daily life and activities.

however, you still have to determine the impact of all the extra exercise you do specifically to get in shape and/or lose weight.

MFP will do that for you and calls that number the TDEE. that's DAILY BMR + EXERCISE CALORIES.

so for you, let's say your BASE BMR is 1400. your DAILY BMR for a sedentary lifestyle would be 1680. if you tell MFP you plan on exercising 400 calories every day, it will tell you that your TDEE is 2080 and that to lose 1 lb per week, you should only eat 1580 calories per day on the days you do that exercise (1180 on the days you don't do that exercise).

i use the terms BASE BMR and DAILY BMR to make a distinction between the steps in the BMR calculation. MFP hides this detail from you, but does take it into account. i've double checked my hand calculations for myself against MFP and they are very close.