To calculate calories burned, know your total daily energy expenditure.
To successfully maintain or lose weight you must know how many calories to consume and expend each day. Everyone needs to expend a certain number of calories from fat, carbohydrates and protein to support physiological function. Once you understand what this baseline is, you can calculate how many calories you need for the level of exercise you do. Unless you want to undergo expensive calorimetry measurement, using basal metabolic rate is the easiest method. Then, total calories and fat burned makes sense.
Instructions
Daily Energy Expenditure
1. Calculate your basal metabolic rate, or BMR. This is the bare minimum number of calories needed to sustain physiological function. Once you know this, you can figure how many more calories are required when you do certain activities. You need to know your current height and weight to determine BMR.
2. Use the appropriate formula for your sex to determine BMR. For males, the BMR is equal to 66 + (6.23 x weight in pounds) + (12.7 x height in inches) -- (6.8 x age in years). The formula for a 200 pound man who is 35 years old and 70 inches tall would be 66 + 1246 + 889 -- 238, which equals a BMR requirement of 1,963 calories per day.
For females the BMR formula is 655 + (4.35 x weight in pounds) + (4.7 x height in inches) -- (4.7 x age in years). The formula for a 130-pound woman who is 64 inches tall and 25 years old would be 655 + 566 + 300 -- 117, which equals 1,404 calories per day.
3. Multiply your BMR by a daily activity factor. The daily activity factor determines your total daily energy expenditure. Choose from these categories: sedentary, light exercise, moderate exercise, heavy exercise or very heavy exercise. Sedentary means no exercise, and if you fall into this category, multiply your BMR by 1.2. With a BMR of 1,963, your total daily energy expenditure in calories would be 2,356.
Light exercise is defined as sports or exercise one to three times per week. The multiplier for this category is 1.375. Moderate exercise is physical activity three to five times per week and the multiplier is 1.55. Heavy exercise equals sports or exercise six to seven times a week with a multiplier of 1.725. Very heavy exercise means exercising or regular strenuous activity two times each day with a multiplier of 1.9.
Daily Calories Burned
4. Track all your physical activity. In a journal or diary, write down the type of physical activity, when you did it and for how long. You also can keep a food diary that tracks the total number of calories you consumed during the same period.
5. Determine calories burned for each activity. There are calorie calculators that provide information about how many calories you burn per minute or hour of activity completed. What you burn depends upon how much you weigh and how much effort you put into the activity. Many people walk to lose weight. Typically, walking burns about 2.2 calories per pound of body weight per hour. So a 130-pound woman could burn about 286 calories in an hour of walking. For each activity written down, determine how many calories you expended.
6. Add up all expended calories for the day. You will have an accurate measurement of calories burned. You can compare this amount to the number of calories consumed if you are keeping a food diary, too.
Tags: many calories, number calories, calories burned, energy expenditure, physical activity