Your body needs energy in the form of calories to function normally. Each minute of every day, your body is performing life-sustaining activities. You have to breathe, blink, circulate blood, control body temperature, grow new cells, support brain and nerve activity and contract muscles.
The amount of energy (in the form of calories) that the body needs to function while resting for 24 hours is known as the basal metabolic rate, or BMR. This number of calories reflects how much energy your body requires to support vital body functions if you were resting for an entire day.
It may surprise you to know that your BMR is the single largest component (more than 60 percent) of your total energy burned every day. It’s also used by many coaches to help determine weight loss. You can use IIFYM’s BMR calculator to find your BMR. Here at IIFYMs, we take a different tack.
There isn’t a great difference between BMR and RMR. Your RMR reading includes your BMR plus the number of calories burned while eating and doing light activities such as stretching, walking, going to the bathroom, etc. Consider your activities around the house while having some time off or on a weekend and know that these are part of your RMR results. These are the small activities that the RMR takes into account.
Your resting metabolic rate, or RMR is always slightly higher than your BMR. Here at IIFYM, we prefer using your RMR as a baseline when we compute your fat loss macros, since we feel it gives us a better better platform to work from when calculating the rest of the numbers used in an IIFYM fat loss program.
How do I calculate my RMR? You can use the IIFYM RMR Calculator to calculate your Resting Metabolic Rate (RMR). RMR is a very useful tool for flexible dieting with IIFYM techniques in mind.
Of course, there are many factors that can affect your RMR. These factors do not drastically change your metabolic rate, but they can alter the results and readings. According to Body Building, these factors include: