Hi all!
I thought I'd look at something that I had heard on a weight loss show recently. Quite often, on these shows, those needing to lose weight insist that they aren't eating as much as people think. And the MD interviewed said that it doesn't take alot of calories to maintain a high body weight as compared to a healthy body weight, so that these individuals were indeed accurate. And that got me to thinking (NNOOoooooooo! )
If we consider Basal Metabolic Rate as the minimum calories needed to sustain life, what calorie intake is required to maintain a high body weight?
So what I did was take my gender, height, and age and consider myself as sedentary, and used this calculator
http://health.drgily.com/basal-metab...calculator.php
to calculate my BMR only for different weights.
Now, I KNOW that different calculators give different results, so please DON'T look at the absolute numbers. And I know that there are other factors than simply BMR, but BMR represents the MINIMUM calories needed to sustain life, so I thought it was a good place to start so I limited myself to this.
Please also note that this is NOT a recommendation about calories required to lose weight and so on. I am not a calorie counter, and make no claims to know a whole lot about this. I just thought this was interesting and decided to make it simple by looking at BMR...
Just look at the relative difference between calories needed to sustain BMR for the different weights:
150 lbs -- BMR 1368 calories BMI = normal
175 lbs -- BMR 1482 calories BMI = overweight
192 lbs -- BMR 1559 calories BMI 30 = obese
200 lbs -- BMR 1596 calories
225 lbs -- BMR 1709 calories
250 lbs -- BMR 1823 calories
275 lbs -- BMR 1937 calories
300 lbs -- BMR 2050 calories
325 lbs -- BMR 2164 calories
There isn't a whole lot of difference between the calories required to maintain 150 lbs and 325 lbs -- only 800 calories! That isn't a whole bunch!!!
And to maintain an obese weight, I only need around 200 extra calories a day more than I would need to sustain a healthy weight.
And for every 25lb in weight, I need only around 100 calories to maintain the extra fat.
Not a whole lot!!!
I was kind of surprised, because I always assumed that if you weighed alot, it took ALOT of calories to maintain that weight. But it seems that it doesn't. And it seems to me that if you weigh alot but don't cut your calories below your BMR, you just won't lose the weight easily...
Thoughts?
Kira