It’s good to be back to blogging. MORFIT has been open for two months now, and it’s about time we continued to bring you posts on everything health & fitness.
Behold the first of three parts to our Metabolism & Diet, with a Pinch of Exercise series. Over the next few weeks you will develop the tools needed to determine your approximate daily caloric balance; thus giving you an idea of whether you’re on track to lose or gain weight. Here we go:
The Pie Test
We are constantly burning energy (calories) throughout the day. Everything we do requires our bodies to burn off calories. We can group these calorie-burning activities into three categories: Exercise, Metabolism, and Activities of Daily Living (ADL’s).
Exercise refers to planned activities that considerably increase heart rate and perspiration for an extended period of time.
Metabolism refers to all processes of the body required to keep you alive. This includes cell metabolism, tissue repair, digestion, maintaining body temperature (thermoregulation), etc.
ADL’s refer to all the activities you do throughout the day that are not scheduled exercise. This includes going to work, working, going shopping, housework, etc.
These three categories fall into the pie chart below; representing total calories expended per day. The blue portion (#1) contributes to the most calories burnt, followed by the green portion (#2), and finally the red portion (#3) contributing to the least amount of calories. Here’s your challenge: Place the three categories of caloric expenditure (exercise, metabolism, ADL’s) into the right piece of the pie.
Most of you will have put exercise into the blue portion, the biggest contributor of caloric expenditure. Here’s the answer.
1. Metabolism (biggest contributor)
2. ADL’s (second biggest contributor)
3. Exercise (smallest contributor)
BEFORE YOU CANCEL YOUR GYM MEMBERSHIP; PLEASE KEEP READING!!!
This may be startling information for some of you, but fear not, information is power. If exercise accounts for the least amount of calories burnt throughout the day, then that must imply that managing your weight does not rely on busting your butt in the gym seven days/week! And such is the case. Over the next two articles, we will explore the role of exercise, lifestyle and diet in weight management. But don’t go anywhere until you’ve finished your homework. Below is a formula to determine your basal metabolic rate (BMR), which we are referring to as a generalized metabolism in this article. Put your age, weight, and height into the gender-appropritate formula to determine how many calories you burn per day just by living. (If you don’t like math, you can use this online BMR calculator instead).
Women: BMR = 655 + (9.6 x Kg’s) + (1.8 x cm’s) – (4.7 x age)
Men: BMR = 66 + (13.7 x Kg’s) + (5 x cm’s) – (6.8 x age)
Next week we’ll put this number to work. Until then; why not glance at some food labels and pay attention to how many calories you might be taking in compared to how many calories your metabolism is burning.
-Stuart
