RMR Diet

If you're like most people, you want a diet that you can stick with and that is effective and easy. The RMR diet might be your answer. RMR stands for resting metabolic rate. The amount of food you eat is based on the amount of calories that your individual body needs each day. Using your RMR number as a baseline allows you to know how many calories to eat per day in order to lose weight.

The RMR Diet

RMR is a calculation of the amount of calories that your body needs to maintain homeostasis in a resting state. In other words, it is the amount of calories your body will use to perform all of the various functions around the body -- circulation, respiration, cellular reproduction and digestion, just to name a few. Once you have determined what your RMR is, you can adjust and monitor your calories to keep them in your RMR range. When you eat the minimum amount of calories your body needs at rest, every action you do throughout your day results in burning calories that can lead to weight loss.

Determining Your RMR

RMR is best analyzed in a lab by trained professionals. In this circumstance, your expired air is analyzed using indirect calorimetry. However, you can estimate your resting metabolic rate through a simple equation, known as the Harris-Benedict Equation. First you must convert your body weight from pounds to kilograms. Do this by diving your weight in pounds by 2.2. For a male, RMR = 66.473 + (13.7516 * kg of body weight) + (5.0033 * height in inches) - (6.755 * age in years). For a female, RMR = 655.0955 + (9.5634 * kg of body weight) + (1.8496 * height in inches) - (4.6756 * age in years).

Influences

When you eat according to your RMR, everything that you do is calories burned. This can result in fast and effective weight loss. Physical activity and regular exercise is not taken into account to estimate RMR, but it can have an effect. Physical activity causes an increase in metabolic rate after exercise. It also helps by increasing fat free mass. The more lean body mass you have, the greater your RMR may be. Lean body mass takes more calories to stay alive then fat mass. Your age and gender can also influence your RMR.

Considerations

What you eat can have an affect on your RMR. According to a study published in "Chemistry and Materials Science" in 1997 by W. D. van Marken Lichtenbelt, R. P. Mensink and K. R. Westerterp, the fat that you eat can affect your RMR. Their study determined that a diet containing more polyunsaturated fats than saturated fats results in a higher resting metabolic rate.