Nutrition Tools

In today’s post I will show you some of the tools / calculators I use to assist me in my fitness journey. (They are all free!)

Let's s get started… one pound = 3,500 calories, to lose 1 lb (let’s say per week), you will need to burn 3,500 more calories than you consume in a week.

Therefore, on average, you will need to burn 500 more calories per day than you consume. It is THAT SIMPLE!

Tools to assist…

1) Body Mass Index (BMI) – uses a person’s height and weight to determine overall body health.

This index is used for tracking your overall progress. The index is a guide, it does not take into account bone structure or muscle mass etc. A rating of 25 or higher = overweight.

http://www.bmi-calculator.net/

Steve’s BMI = 24.82 (whew! Cutting it close!)

2) Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) or Resting Metabolic Rate (RMR) – this provides an estimated resting daily caloric burn rate. In other words, if you laid in bed all day, your BMR is the amount of calories your body would burn.

http://health.drgily.com/basal-metabolic-rate-calculator.php

Knowing this number is good info but it is incomplete. You need to add to it, the number of calories you burn while your body is "working" or "not at rest". Obviously, that depends on the activities and luckily there are calculators for this as well, we'll take a look at them later in the post.

3) There is a FREE website, http://www.everydayhealth.com that has a lot of tools to help you measure your caloric intake and expenditures.

There are many features:

a) start your own blog
b) calorie counter
c) recipe section
d) discussion forums and more.

Using the "My Calorie Counter" is a great tool. You can calculate the calories of many foods, which you can do a search for in their database. You can enter items that you eat each day to measure what you have eaten or use this as a meal planner, so you can plan your meals. Either way you can do a fair job of estimating calories, fat, fiber, carbs, sugar and protein.

Equally important, there is a section that estimates calories expended, this is a huge benefit when attempting to calculate weight gain/loss. Plug in your activity, weightlifting, jogging, etc etc and the length of time or distance and it will estimate the calories burned/expended.

I urge you to look over this site. http://www.everydayhealth.com/

Hope this helps you.


Steve