1) Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR)

BMR is the total number of calories your body burns for normal bodily functions,
including digestion, circulation, respiration, temperature regulation, cell construction, and
every other metabolic process in your body.

In Trainer Ben words, your BMR is the  total of all the energy used for basic bodily functions, NOT including physical activity.

BMR usually makes up for the largest amount of your daily calorie burn – about two thirds.  BMR is at its lowest and slowest when you’re sleeping and you’re not digesting anything.

BMR varies dramatically from person to person depending on genetic factors.

You probably know someone who can eat anything they want yet they never gain an ounce of fat. This type of “fast metabolism” person has inherited a naturally high BMR.

2) Activity Level

Next to BMR, your activity level is the second most important factor in how many
calories you need every day.

The more active you are, the more calories you burn; it’s that simple.

Become more active and you burn more calories. Sit on the couch all day long and you hardly burn any.

3) Weight

Your total body weight and total body size are also major factors in the number of
calories you require.

The bigger your size, the more calories you’ll require to move your
body.

4) Lean Body Mass (aka LBM)

Total body weight correlates with the number of calories you require, but separating your
total weight into its lean and fat components allows you to calculate your calorie needs
even more accurately.

The higher your Lean Body Mass, the higher your BMR will be.

This is very significant when you want to lose body fat because it means the more muscle you have, the more calories you will burn at rest.

Muscle is metabolically active tissue, and it requires a great deal of energy to sustain it.

The best way to increase your BMR is to increase your LBM. This is why weight training helps you lose body fat, although indirectly. Also the reason men usually burn fat a little quicker than women.

5) Age

Metabolic rate tends to slow down with age.

Therefore, the number of calories the average person requires also goes down with age.

Fortunately, you can prevent and even reverse the age-related slowdown in metabolism by developing more muscle through weight training and healthy eating.

6) Gender

Men usually require more calories than women.

The average male has a maintenance level of 2800 calories per day. The average female requires only 2000 calories per day to maintain.

The reason for this difference is not so much a sex-related issue as a body
weight and muscle mass issue;

the average man carries much more muscle mass than the average female and this explains the spread in calorie requirements between men and women.

Except for individual genetically-related differences in BMR, a 140 pound man and a 140 pound woman would have the same calorie requirements if their activity levels were identical.

How many calories do you burn a day?

Trainer B.

Unable to sleep is common for most even me. That is the reason I am writing about it at 11:30pm.

A lot of you are familiar with the common question I ask every morning before boot camp. “Did you get plenty of sleep last night” and more often than not I hear the response “NO”!!!

How important is it really?

Lack of sleep increases snacking and bingeing

Multiple sleep related studies have found a connection between sleep and the hormones that influence our eating behavior. Two major hormones are involved. Ghrelin is responsible for feelings of hunger. Leptin tells the brain when it’s time to stop eating. When you’re sleep deprived, your ghrelin levels increase at the same time that your leptin levels decrease. This equals an increased craving for food and not feeling full. And sleep deprived people tend to choose different foods to snack on—mainly high caloric sweets and salty and starchy foods. These small changes can lead to long-term weight gain.

How much sleep should I get to lose weight

The average person needs between seven and nine hours of sleep a night. Some more, some less. Very few of us actually get the minimum of seven. How do you know how much sleep you really need? Experts suggest to sleep as long as you want for several days (best done on vacation somewhere with sandy beaches and warm weather . Then, your sleep should stabilize and you’ll find yourself waking up after the same number of hours daily, within 15 minutes or so. Once you know about how much sleep you need, start getting into a steady routine. Set a regular time for sleep. Start getting ready ahead of time. And avoid using the bed for watching TV or doing work (Guilty).

Exercise + Sleep + Healthy Diet = Weight Loss

Disclaimer: Don’t think snoozing a few hours longer each night will solve a weight problem. It won’t. You can’t use this article as an excuse to miss 5:30am boot camp.  Exercising and eating healthfully is still the way to go. But, lack of sleep may soon be considered another risk factor for obesity. Especially since 65 % of Americans are overweight and 63% of people don’t get eight hours of sleep a night. Interestingly enough, many of those who are overweight also don’t sleep enough.

A recent study

At the annual meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies today, Dr. Walter Moraes of Universidad Federal Sao Paolo, Brazil, presented the findings from a study he recently conducted which demonstrated that people lose weight three times as fast while asleep than while lying in bed awake. Dr. Moraes studied 14 healthy men age 21-30, confining them to a bed with a built in scale which allowed him to constantly monitor their weight. The subjects spent the night in bed asleep, and then remained in bed for the next 8 hours, awake. They were given food and drink proportionate to their body weight and, according to the poster, did not urinate or defecate during the study. Dr. Moraes found that the average weight loss during sleep was 1.9 gram/minute (or ¼ pound an hour), but only 0.6 gram/minute while lying in bed awake.

Good night and sweet dreams.

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