Calorie Calculator and Formulas Don’t Work

Imagine you have never gone on a diet, eating everything, and now you decided to lose weight according to scientific principles. You’ve learned from the Internet that there is the main metabolism – this is the metabolism that occurs in the body at rest – and want to use a calorie calculator to know the exact figures.

What’s wrong with calorie calculator?

So you calculated your “healthy” calorie intake according to the formula of Harris-Benedict or Mifflin-San Geor, multiplied by the coefficient of physical activity, and got your daily calorie content.

But what if we say that between the two recommended formulas, there is an output difference of 15%? You can check – this is really so, we substituted height, weight, and age into it. Let us remind you that when gaining muscle mass or reducing fat, the recommended size of the deficit or surplus is just 15-20%. Agree that the body doesn’t care what formula you used.

It remains to switch to clean eating. Down with sweets and fat, and hello brown rice and chicken breast. Where is the weak link here, because everything is according to science?

The problem of formulas

The fact is that if you did not evaluate your daily calorie intake before entering a diet, then going to clean eating, you wouldn’t be able to understand how much less, and whether there was less food at all. On the Internet, of course, you read that you need six, while you ate three and a half times a day, which will create even more confusion. Well, six is ​​six.

What do we have? You ate one breakfast sandwich with butter and sausage, and now 100 g of oatmeal and a packet of 5% cottage cheese. What has a higher calorie content? We hope the logic is clear.

You ate completely ordinary food, the caloric value of which you did not know. Now on the clean eating, it is quite possible to eat calories in excess. There is no difference for your body from where to accumulate fat from sweet rolls with sausages or rice with fish.

So, where is the mistake?

In the formula for calculating the main metabolism? Of course, it gives errors, but not so big.

It’s all about the physical activity coefficients that are attached to it and are equal for low physical activity (1-3 workouts per week) -1.37. Moderate (3-5 workouts per week) -1.55, then 1.72 and 1.9. Modern residents of cities don’t have such activity!

Output. We do not recommend applying formulas where the coefficient of physical activity is greater than 1.25 unless you are busy at work using heavy physical labor. And of course, the selection of supporting calories experimentally will give more accurate results.

Additionally, see how calorie cycling fakes your body out.

What is more, why not read how to count calories in food correctly?