When someone desires to lose, maintain, or gain weight through calorie-counting, he or she depends upon the relationship between calories-in and calories-out. The theory is that a person will maintain weight if the calories consumed equal the calories expended. The expended calories may be divided between the base metabolic rate (BMR), the calories expended simply by being alive, and the calories expended through daily activity, which includes the calories expended through merely moving around as well as through working or exercising. When a person decides to count calories, a single question immediately arises. How does one determine his or her caloric expenditure?
The BMR is generally determined though online calculators. Those calculators also tend to offer estimates for calories burned throughout the day. However, such calculators are mostly likely inaccurate. Through online calculators, my caloric expenditure was determined to be between 2,800 and 3,200 calories per day depending upon my physical activity level. Fitness trackers obviously use similar algorithms because I wore a Fitbit for several months that reported my calorie expenditure to be 2,400 to 3,600 calories a day depending upon my activity level. One day my Fitbit reported that I expended 4,200 calories.
Bodybuilders “bulk” by consuming around that many calories. I was overweight and not muscular, so suggesting that I would maintain weight by consuming that many calories was obviously incorrect. But, say that I used one of those calculators to determine my calorie target for losing weight. I could have turned my life upside down to count every calorie that I consumed only to find myself gaining weight! That would have been a crushing discouragement.
In such a circumstance, gaining weight would not have necessarily been my fault. Such calorie calculators simply cannot be accurate. To accurately measure calories expended, an individual must be monitored in a lab under different conditions such as sleeping and exercising. Specialized equipment would be used to track various measurements including the individual’s heartrate and the composition of the air inhaled and exhaled by the individual. A consumer fitness tracker and, especially, an online calculator falls short of such lab measurements.
Unfortunately, calculators and trackers appear to overestimate expended calories, which is detrimental to individuals attempting to maintain or lose weight. For an example, an inaccuracy of +10% would mean that a person looking to maintain weight may be consuming 2,200 calories instead of 2,000. Such a misreport would result in the person gaining weight over time with a 200 calories surplus. Conversely, someone looking to lose weight may be maintaining or even gaining weight.
With these issues, what is a person to do? In the next post I will detail a method that I have developed and used successfully for determining average calorie expenditure.
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