Metabolic Rate & Weight Loss

Your metabolic rate determines how many calories you burn over the course of a day. Factors that influence your metabolic rate include activity intensity and duration and the food you eat. To lose weight, you must burn more calories than you take in, so determining your metabolic rate is crucial. Consult your physician before beginning any diet or exercise program.

Basal Metabolic Rate

Your basal metabolic rate is the amount of calories you burn without any additional activity during a 24-hour period. The more lean body mass you have, the higher your BMR. The older you are, the lower your BMR; the general decrease in lean muscle tissue as you age is a factor here. An average adult burns about 70 percent through the regular processes of the body, such as keeping the heart beating and blood flowing. An additional 20 percent will come from physical activity and the remaining 10 percent from the production of heat, including the digestion of food.

Exercise

The easiest way to increase your BMR is to exercise. There are two types of effect on BMR, short-term and long-term. Short-term is the immediate energy expenditure of activity. The number of calories you burn walking a mile is an example of a short-term increase in BMR. The more intense the exercise, the longer you continue to burn calories. A heavy bout of resistance training, for example, can elevate your BMR for up to 48 hours after exercising.

BMR and Weight Loss

For maximum weight loss, or, better yet, fat loss, you need to elevate your BMR as often as possible, as aggressively as possible. Training twice a day will have a greater effect on your fat loss than training once a day, even if the caloric expenditure is the same. You will continue to burn calories after your first training session, then more following your second training session. Performing cardiovascular exercise in the morning followed by resistance training in the evening is an excellent way to accomplish this.

Body Fat

You want to concentrate on losing fat, not just weight. If you lose muscle tissue, your BMR will decrease, and your fat and weight loss will slow. This is one of the reasons why resistance training has such an effect on energy levels. It is also important to improve your diet, because no matter how hard you are training or how many times per day --- if you are consuming more food that the offensive line of your local football team, you are not going to lose an ounce. Regardless of the changes you make to your BMR, you still must burn more calories than you take in.