BMI??..BMR?...what??

BMR - How many calories a day you are burning by just having your organs work. I have always looked at this as the min amount of calories I should eat a day. I trust the MFP number because it has worked so well for me but there are a lot of different ways of calculating this.

BMI - An equation that gives a "scale" as whether or not you are obese, overweight, normal or underweight. If you search for it, there are BMI ranges for each of those catagories. However, this is really inaccurate if you are at hieght extreems and does not factor in your normal build.

I hope that helps.

Food fight do the math...
So, all that math in my previous post to say that I learned I wasn't eating enough calories to lose weight, boggles the mind, but so true. So, this is what I learned. With my triathlon training, I've been burning about 1200 calories with my workouts. I work out over 2 hours per day 6 days a week. But I've only been eating 1650 calories per day. I have been frustrated as I hadn't been losing any weight, which has been a big goal for me. I have a lot more weight to lose. I've lost 37 pounds so far, but I truly have 35 more to go. So, I was on a quest to figure out why I wasn't losing weight and learned I had to increase my calories. Weird right, increase calories to lose weight? But once I got this figured out, I dropped 3 pounds practically over night. So here it is for you.

Everyone has a Basic Metoblic Rate or BMR to calculate yours click here: http://www.myfitnesspal.com/tools/bmr-calculator your BMR changes with your weight and age, so you have to recalculate it on a regular basis. Very easy to do. Mine is 1650. What your BMR shows is how many calories your body needs each day to survive so if you lived on the couch and slept all day and did nothing, or rather if I did, I'd need 1650 calories per day to not lose any weight or gain any weight. If I want to lose weight, I need to eat fewer than 1650 calorier per day, but not less than 1200. Most people if they eat less than 1200 calories, their metabolism drops and your body goes into starvation mode and your body holds onto its fat stores. This was happening to me! So you have to eat a minimum of 1200 calories per day. So if you take 1650-1200 =450. This difference becomes important if you are working out a lot, need to increase calories but still need to lose weight.

That means I can safely eat less than 450 calories per day and still lose weight if I never exercise. But what happens if I excerise??? Let's say I go running for 1 hour and burn 500 calories, I would not want to eat 1650+500=2150 because Iwant to lose weight. If I wanted to maintain weight, then I would eat 2150 calories. As I'm trying to lose weight, I'd eat 2150-450= 1700. So you see, I need to increase my calorie intake with exersize in this case my increase was only 50 calories. Now look at the math when I'm burning 1200 calories through exercise. 1650+1200= 2850. Imagine my shock that I was supposed to be eating almost double the amount of calories to maintain my weight. To safely lose weight, I take the 2850 and subract 450 and my increase becomes = 2450. So I literally increased my caloric intact by about 5,000 calories per week and lost 3 pounds. Believe it or not, it's true!!! I hope this helps you.

From my blog: http://competingiswinning.blogspot.com/p/food-fight.html

To gaeljo: Omg I have been trying to figure this out for awhile and now it makes sooo much sense. Thanks for breaking it down like that. I get it now!! Yeah! Now i'm really excited.