BMR gives a count of the calories that you burn if you do not work throughout the day and stay in one place. It is the minimum amount of energy that your body needs to keep you alive. In resting state, the calories you burn give off enough energy to keep your vital organs like heart, lungs, kidneys and the central nervous system working.
It helps in determining the overall metabolic rate of the body and helps in determining how much calories an individual needs to lose, gain or maintain for their weight. It decreases with age because the body mass decreases with age.
There are a lot of genetic and environmental factors that help in determining the BMR of an individual. Genetically, some individuals are born with faster metabolism and some of them have slower metabolisms by birth. Similarly the gender of a person also plays an important role. Men have faster metabolisms as compared to women. This is because men are more muscular with fewer fats that make their BMR higher.
Your physique also helps in determining the BMR. The fatter you are the higher is your BMR. Obese women have 25% higher BMR than that of a thin woman. Age is also a factor that affects BMR. After 20 years of age, it starts decreasing by 2% each decade.
This is because in young individuals, the cells are continuously dividing thus giving of energy and in turn increasing the BMR. As you get older with aging, you notice that if you stay active enough and eat like you used to, you start getting fatter. This is because as you age your BMR starts decreasing thus the amount of calorie intake increases and the amount of burning reduces.
Taller people compared with shorter people of the same weight are seen to have higher BMR. Lower body fats mean higher BMR. Increase or decrease in temperature also causes increase or decrease in BMR of a person. Similarly starvation, hormones, your physical exercise, breast feeding, pregnancy, sex, stress and weather also play an important role in determining your BMR.
When you are trying to lose weight, you must make sure that your BMR is as high as you can make it. To lose weight, you need to take in 500 less calories of the total calories you are required to take in. Also you need to increase the amount of physical exercise you do. On average your body needs about 35 calorie per kilogram. Starving yourself never helps you in losing weight because it decreases your actual BMR. Eating at frequent intervals causes your body to burn calories and increases the BMR by 20%.
Thus to sum it all up in a few words, BMR is the energy required by your body if you are fasting and sleeping all day long. It plays an important role in regulating the body weight and the muscle definition of our body. It is an important and delicate function of the body and in any case, its value should not be decreased if you want yourself to stay healthy and happy.
Use the tool below to calculate BMR. The results of the BMR calculations will be displayed below...
Your Basal Metabolic Rate is:
Your Average Daily Calorie Need is:
The health calculator given here do not provide medical advice and do not replace the advice of a medical professional. Care has been taken to make sure the calculator is generating correct results, but no guarantee is made that the results are accurate. The health tools use professionally accepted and peer reviewed algorithms to calculate their results or simple mathematical equations.
Based on Daily Calorie Needs Calculator
