Dr John: The Secret to Burning Calories
I’ve heard many things about fad diets and quick ways to burn calories. There are some that say chewing gum helps you burn calories. While I can’t say I’ve heard of any research that reports how many calories chewing gum burns, I can speculate that chewing gum is not the way to slimming down your waist line. There are a lot of promotions and magazine articles that pull us in saying they have the way to burn the most calories in the least amount of time. But there is a good, proven, scientific way to burning calories: DIET AND EXERCISE.
What many people don’t know is that your body does, in fact, burn calories when you are not doing anything. It’s called the Basal Metabolic Rate or BMR. It’s based on a person’s height, weight, gender and age. Everyone’s BMR is different, but it is best defined as the number of calories your body burns while performing zero activity. So with BMR, you burn calories watching TV and sleeping. However, most of us do not burn enough calories with BMR to cause any weight loss. There is also a way to calculate the amount of calories you burn with your daily activity. The Harris Benedict equation calculates total caloric needs based upon your BMR and your activity level. Activity being work or exercise. “Total caloric needs” means how many calories you would need to maintain your current weight. Right there is the BIG SECRET. If you know your total caloric needs for the day and you want to lose weight you simply need to consume less calories that what you need to maintain your current weight.
It’s a simple arithmetic problem. Determine how many calories you need per day to stay at your current weight and then take some away. How many should you take away? That’s something you would need to determine yourself. How much weight do you want to lose? One pound = 3500 calories and most experts say that healthy weight loss is 1-2 pounds per week. I recommend seeking out a health care profession like a registered dietician/nutritionist or a chiropractic physician that provides nutritional counseling such as myself or Dr. Ducat for help with establishing these types of goals. There are also websites that provide the calculations I spoke of above. You can visit the site and input your information into the equations and determine your BMR.