How many calories for you?

Your body’s need for energy or fuel never stops. Every minute of every day, your body needs a constant supply of energy to stay alive and function well. How much? Energy needs vary from person to person. Even your personal energy needs to be altered at various ages and stages of existence. Your age, basal metabolic rate, system size and composition, actual situation, and activity level all contribute to the amount of energy you need.

Fueling your system could be compared to fueling your vehicle. Both your car and your body require a power source just to keep it idling. Every time you move, your body, like your car, burns more energy and uses even more to go faster and further. Some bodies, and some cars, are more fuel efficient than other people. That is, they use much less energy to do exactly the same amount of work. The age group, the dimension, the shape, the gender, the real condition and even the type of “fuel” affect the energy efficiency.

The energy for basal fat burning capacity (basic requirements) is energy that your body melts down when it is “idle.” In scientific terms, basal metabolic rate (BMR) may be the level of energy needed to keep involuntary bodily processes going. These consist of pumping your heart, breathing, generating body heat, sweating to keep fit, transmitting messages to your brain, and producing thousands of body chemicals. When we think of calories, energy burned through actual activity often comes to mind.

However, for most people, basal fat-burning capacity accounts for about 60 percent of the body’s energy needs. The simple “rule of ten” offers a quick and easy estimate of how much energy your body uses for basal metabolism on a daily basis. Allow 10 calories from fat per pound of body weight for women and 11 calories from fat per pound for men to meet daily energy demands.

Here’s an example: consider an energetic 130-pound woman. She would burn about 1,300 calories from fat (130 pounds × 10 calories per pound) per day for basal fat-burning capacity and about 2,200 calories from complete fat per day. (That’s 60% of total calories from fat for her basic energy needs.) Now calculate for yourself: About how much energy might her system require for her basic needs? Why can a person consume more calories day after day and never gain a pound? For another person of the same age, height, and activity level, managing weight is a constant challenge.

The “rule of ten (or eleven)” does not allow for individual differences in basal metabolic rate (BMR). Age, gender, genetics, and body size and composition, among other elements, have an effect on fundamental power requirements. Although you don’t need to learn your BMR to achieve and maintain a healthy fat, it can be useful information for some people, possibly athletes in training. Health or fitness professionals can find out for you personally.

Worth noting: A palm-sized device is accessible that people can use to measure their resting metabolic rate. Young people, from infancy through adolescence, need more calories from fat per pound than adults to build bones, muscles, and other tissues. Throughout childhood, energy requirements are higher per pound of body weight than at any other time in life.

And just watch a growing teenager consume; you realize that energy needs are higher during adolescence! (The “rule of ten” is not intended for children, especially infants.) In adulthood, energy needs (calories) from food and BMR begin to decline: 2 percent per decade. For example, a woman who needs about 2,200 calories per night for her total energy needs at age twenty-five may need 2% less, or 2,156 calories per day, at age thirty-five.

She may need an additional 2 percent much less at age forty-five, and so on. Why the decrease in BMR? The composition of the system and hormones are altered with age. And with much less physical activity, muscle mass decreases; system fat requires its place. Simply because body fat burns less energy than muscle, fewer calories are required to maintain body fat and the basal metabolic rate decreases. (As an aside, normal physical action can help keep energy needs up.)

If you continue to stick to your teenage eating habits, and live a less active lifestyle, the extra pounds that come with age shouldn’t surprise you! Unused calories from fat are stored as system fat. Genetic makeup and the construction of the inherited system explain some variations in basal metabolic rate – differences you can’t alter! (Families also tend to pass on eating habits to an additional year, which may also explain similarities in body weight.) Think about the effect on BMR and energy needs:

1. Typically, a big, heavy car uses much more fuel per mile than a small, fancy sports car. Similarly, the more you weigh, the more fat calories you melt. The size of the system makes a distinction. It takes a little more effort to move if you weigh 170 pounds compared to 120. That’s one reason why men, who often weigh much more, consume more calories than women.

2. A lean, muscular body has a higher metabolic rate than a smoothly rounded body with more fat tissue. Why? Gram for gram, muscle burns much more energy than body weight. So the higher your muscle to fat ratio, the more calories from fat you have to maintain your weight. A smoothly rounded body type has a higher tendency to accumulate body fat than a lean, muscular body. Tip: Stay physically active to maintain your muscle mass and increase your BMR.

3. A tall, skinny body also has more surface area than a short body and, as a result, much more heat loss; the net result: more calories from fat burned (higher BMR) to maintain regular body temperature. The relationship between muscle and weight differs by sex, which explains the differences in basal metabolic rate. Until the age group of 10 years, the potency requirements for boys and girls are more or less the same, but then the triggers of puberty are modified.

When children start to build more muscle, they need many more calories from fat; its added height and dimension also demand much more power. As adults, men generally have much less body fat and 10-20% more muscle than women of the same age and weight. That is one of the reasons why men’s basic energy needs are higher. In contrast, women’s bodies naturally hold system weight stores in reserve for pregnancy and lactation.

During pregnancy and lactation, a woman’s energy needs increase. To meet the energy demands of full-term pregnancy, women need an additional 300 calories per day, or an additional 80,000 calories during the nine months. To breastfeed her baby, a woman needs about 500 extra calories from fat per night during the time she is breastfeeding.

Outside temperature affects internal energy production. On cold days, your BMR “burns” a little more to keep you warm during prolonged exposure to the cold. Shaking and moving to keep warm use power, too. And in hot temperatures, your body’s air conditioning system burns a little more energy, for example, as you sweat yourself to death. Do you think skipping meals or following a very low calorie eating plan provides a weight loss advantage?

Think again. Severe calorie restriction can actually make your body more energy efficient and cause the rate at which your system melts energy from food to slow down. So you need fewer calories to perform exactly the same system processes. This slowdown in metabolic rate is your body’s survival strategy. Depending on the duration and intensity of the exercise, a physical workout can increase your BMR for several hours afterwards