Lose 20 Lbs Now - Bmr and Calories, Why You Must Eat to Break Even

BMR stands for basal metabolic rate and is the rate at which you burn calories while doing nothing at all. That's right; you burn calories just by sitting there on the couch watching television. Of course, you are not really "just" sitting there, are you? You are blinking, which involves moving tiny muscles in your eyelids to open and close. You are breathing, which means that your lungs are inflating and deflating, your diaphragm is moving up and down. Your heart is beating, contracting and expanding, beat after beat after beat. And all of these complex processes are happening because your brain is sending out billions of electrical impulses, neurons interacting via synapses making it all happen. All of this major activity, whether you realize it or not, is going on or not, takes energy. Your BMR is the amount of calories that you burn to simply maintain life.

But, why, you might ask, is it important to know your BMR in the first place? First, you must know this number so that you have a baseline to work with, when you are trying to decide how many calories you need to eliminate from your diet each day. Too few and you will never lose any weight. Too many and you will never lose any weight. It is a game won and lost by inches, and too often people just blast for the bleachers when all they need is an in-field bunt to get the job done.

If you cut too many calories out of your daily diet, your body will become convinced that it is starving to death and will send up the panic flags. All non-essential systems will be slowed or stopped. The metabolism will slow to a crawl- all fuel that is being brought in now will be considered essential and will be immediately stored to protect against impending doom.

On the other hand, if you are eating too many calories, the body will be overwhelmed. Storage systems will be overwhelmed with all of the food that is being brought in- the body will start storing everything for future sorting. Sadly, the body is not so great at file retrieving and new foods just keep coming in every day. Keep flooding the body this way and your metabolism will walk off the job in utter frustration.

Trying to lose weight requires a lot of information. You need to know how much your maintenance is costing you in terms of total calories. Once you know what your BMR is you can experiment by reducing your total daily calories by 500 for a week or two. If you do not lose any weight at all, you can go up to 1000 calories. At no point should you drop more than 1200 calories per day without a doctor's express notice to do so. Steady weight loss is what you are aiming for, not dangerous weight loss. The faster you lose it, the faster you will regain it is the old adage - aim for a slow and steady weight loss of two pounds the first week and then one pound every week thereafter.