When we start focusing on getting optimal health and fitness of our body, this question usually arises in our mind “how many calories do I burn in a day?” Calories play a crucial role in making your fitness goals. Whether it is for weight loss, weight gain, or fitness goal, how many calories you burn in a day has a significant impact on your body.
To attain any fitness goal, you need to know the number of calories you burn each day. It is not only that you burn calories only by heavy workout; your daily routine, like doing house chores, also helps in burning significant calories.
If you know how many calories you burn naturally in a day by doing house chores and other work, you can make your fitness goals and diet plans accordingly.
In case you want to lose weight, you are needed to calculate the number of calories burned, energy levels in the body, as well as need to figure out what and how much food to consume each day.
As you know, all this, you can manage your fitness goals easily and effectively without harming your body.
For weight loss goals, you need to take fewer calories and burn more calories each day. Thus, you must know the number of calories you burn naturally in a day.
What Is Basal Metabolic Rate?
Even when our body is on resting, we burn calories, for example, blood circulation, breathing, cell production, and nutrients processing. It is a calorie burning rate that our body requires to do daily life sustaining functions.
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How Many Calories Burn In a Day?
The number of average daily calories burned in a day is evaluated on the basis of total energy expenditure (TEE). These below are the various factors on which your total daily energy expenditure based on:
- RMR or Resting Metabolic Rate: RMR is the amount of energy that an individual’s body requires to breathe, circulate blood, and build cells in the body. Factors like body size, gender, and age have an effect on your metabolic rate. RMR contributes about 60% to 75% of the calories you burn in a day.
- NEAT or Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis: Body’s energy consumed in doing daily works like typing on the computer, walking in the office, or washing dishes. The amount of calories you burn in NEAT totally depends on the activity level.
- Calories Burn While Exercising: Duration and intensity of your workout will decide the number of calories you burn while exercising. The amount of calories burned per day while exercising and daily physical activity roughly contributes to 15% – 30% of daily TEE.
- TEF or Thermic Effect of Food: Chewing, digesting, and storing food also contributes to burning calories. All types of food, or we can say macronutrients have their own TEF. The highest TEF is Protein based food as it takes more time to digest. About 10% of the body’s calories are burned by the TEF.
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How To Calculate Calorie Burn In A Day?
You can calculate how many calories you burned in a day through three methods. However, they have their own pros and cons of using these calculation methods.
If you wish, use these three methods and compare each other to estimate which one is best for you.
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Monitoring Activities
You can use devices like FitBit, Polar, and Garmin in which you can check how much a particular kind of activity helps in burning calories. These gadgets help you in monitoring daily activity and give you an estimate of how many calories you have burned in a day.
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However, these gadgets are not accurate, and so many people do not like to believe in them. But in case you want to get the estimate, you can use these devices.
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Metabolism Testing
The tool required to do metabolic testing is expensive and available in the labs and hospitals. These days several health clubs also use metabolic testing tools and offer testing at affordable prices.
This testing tool will help you in determining your diet and workout plans accordingly. But critics say that this tool does not show accurate results. Thus it is not important to take metabolic testing.
NOTE: Make sure to get your metabolic testing done by a qualified technician or trainer for more accurate test results.
Online Calculator
You can use an online calorie calculator to determine how many calories you burn each day. These calculators will tell you the average calories burned in a day according to the type of activities you are engaged in.
PRO TIP: If you want to lose or gain weight, you can use a weight-loss calorie calculator. This will tell you how much calories you require in a day and make your diet plans accordingly.
