Have you ever wondered how many calories you burn in a day? Well, I am going to try to help you find out the answer through this short video. There are two major components of the total energy we burn everyday. The first one is the so-called basal metabolic rate, which is the energy our body needs and burns to stay alive while doing nothing while asleep if you want. The second part is the so-called, energy burned through physical activity which is essentially self explanatory. It is the energy we burn while moving and exercising and so forth.
For the first part, the basal metabolic rate, things are quite simply in terms of predicting somebody’s energy requirements.
Here is how to do it. You will have to go to my website. You have the address here on the right side of the video screen. You go to the main page and then you press on the link, basal metabolic rate calculator and this will lead you to the actual BMR or resting energy expenditure calculator, which is featured here on the screen. You select your personal characteristics like gender, age, height in feet and inches and your current weight and also your level of physical activity at the present time. And then you press the calculate button and as you can see, the program calculates a basal metabolic rate as well as your total energy requirements on that day based on the information you enter.
Now, in terms of the energy requirements for physical activity, things are not so simple because as you can imagine, with different forms of exercise we burn different amounts of calories and different persons based on their weight, for one thing burn different amounts of calories for the same type of physical activity. For example, if I were to walk through the snow, I’ll probably use more energy than if I were to walk on a smooth nice surface. Or if I were to shovel the snow, obviously I would burn more calorie per minute than just walking through it. Well, to help you find out how many calories you burn through physical activity, I have developed a tool which has over 600 different types of exercise that you can fill in and find out how many calories you burn.
And here is how to do it. You will go to my activity calories burned page. The link will be displayed on your tool to the right of the screen. You go to this tool here, activity name, and enter the activity you want to look up. Let us say you want to look at personal grooming, like washing, shaving, and suppose we want to look up the calories burned by a 200-pound person who did this activity for 15 minutes. You can see they burned 48 calories, which is not too much as you probably expect it. But suppose we want to look up for the same person at a different and more intense activity and since we were talking about snow shoeing or walking through snow shoeing, which is as you can see much more intense activity, 8 Mets again for 15 minutes. The 200-pound person burned almost 200 calories. And to get an idea about how you burn your calories through a normal day. Here is an example distribution, you can see that through slow activities like sleeping or light deskwork, you can burn some calories. The numbers look big because you spend a lot of time doing those activities. However, as you move down, especially to the last activity, jogging, you can see that half an hour, you burned 250 calories by jogging, which is seven times more than lying quietly watching TV for three and a half hours, which most Americans do these days unfortunately.
I hope you found these tools useful. I am Dr. Gily Ionescu and I encourage you to continue to visit my website drgily.com for other interesting and useful tools like these. Until next time, stay healthy.
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