BMR and HRM

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Crooks0204
Crooks0204 Posts: 189
in Fitness and Exercise
Please forgive me if there is already a thread about this topic..........just point me to it and I will happily go away. :bigsmile:

I have read on here several times where people say when you use a heart rate monitor you should subtract what your body would have naturally (BMR) burned just to stay alive. I am confused b/c I thought we already had a calorie deficit and that was why we eat our exercise calories. :huh: So my question is does anybody know (I mean really know) if this is correct? Thanks in advance!

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  • wannabskinny85
    wannabskinny85 Posts: 21
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    Bump
  • therealangd
    therealangd Posts: 1,861 Member
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    Some people do. Some people don't. I don't and it works for me. Try it both ways for a couple of weeks and see what works best for you. If you exercise an hour a day and your BMR is 1400, it's only a little more than 50 calories a day. To me it's not that big a deal to worry about.
  • nab22
    nab22 Posts: 168
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    Your HRM doesn't know you're on MFP. It simply looks at how fast your heart is beating, and uses a VO2 formula to predict how many calories you burned over that period of time. If you wear your HRM and sit on the couch, it still says you burned calories. So yes, you should subtract about a calorie for each minute of exercise you're recording to get only your exercise calories from your HRM, rather than exercise + living. MFP already knows how many you burn from being alive, but it can't predict how many you burned from exercise, that's why you enter it.
  • erickirb
    erickirb Posts: 12,293 Member
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    Please forgive me if there is already a thread about this topic..........just point me to it and I will happily go away. :bigsmile:

    I have read on here several times where people say when you use a heart rate monitor you should subtract what your body would have naturally (BMR) burned just to stay alive. I am confused b/c I thought we already had a calorie deficit and that was why we eat our exercise calories. :huh: So my question is does anybody know (I mean really know) if this is correct? Thanks in advance!

    Actually you should subtract maintenance calories, which is higher than BMR, this is because if you didn't exercise you would be doing something (sitting, standing, etc) and not in a coma which is BMR calories. To get your maintenance calories go to your goals tab and look at calories burned from normal daily activity on the top right. Take this divide by 24 to get cals burned per hour then divide by 60 to get cals/minute. If your HRM said you burned 300 cals in 30 minutes you would minus off 30* maintenance cals/minute.

    If your maintenance is 2200 then you would back out 1.53 cals/minute. So in MFP for the 300 cal burn in 30 minute you would enter 254 (300-2200/24/60).
  • Crooks0204
    Crooks0204 Posts: 189
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    Please forgive me if there is already a thread about this topic..........just point me to it and I will happily go away. :bigsmile:

    I have read on here several times where people say when you use a heart rate monitor you should subtract what your body would have naturally (BMR) burned just to stay alive. I am confused b/c I thought we already had a calorie deficit and that was why we eat our exercise calories. :huh: So my question is does anybody know (I mean really know) if this is correct? Thanks in advance!

    Actually you should subtract maintenance calories, which is higher than BMR, this is because if you didn't exercise you would be doing something (sitting, standing, etc) and not in a coma which is BMR calories. To get your maintenance calories go to your goals tab and look at calories burned from normal daily activity on the top right. Take this divide by 24 to get cals burned per hour then divide by 60 to get cals/minute. If your HRM said you burned 300 cals in 30 minutes you would minus off 30* maintenance cals/minute.

    If your maintenance is 2200 then you would back out 1.53 cals/minute. So in MFP for the 300 cal burn in 30 minute you would enter 254 (300-2200/24/60).





    Thanks....this actually makes MUCH more sense. I mean the people who dont exercise still lose weight b/c MFP creates a deficit with their BMR calories in mind so I did not make sense to me to subtract them from my workout. Your post makes sense! Thank you so much!

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