When I was a kid I used to play this apple game called Math Munchers. I have often thought of this game when I think of fat loss, thinking of these little green munchers chomping away at calories (something like a Pacman game). I am very visual…or weird…however you want to look at it.

The first thing that most of us do when beginning a new diet program is calculate our needed caloric intake through way of activity level measurement. The concept is pretty simple…

Take bodyweight, height, age, gender and then throw it all into an equation blender and out comes our BMR (Basel metabolic rate). This is the level of energy you should be expending at rest. Note the “SHOULD BE” again as we are going to get into the thought of what you are and how different that can be.

From there we combine that data with an activity level, and this is where it can really get tricky. An activity level isn’t exactly something that is laid out in front of us as an absolute. It’s activity, and it changes on a day-to-day basis depending on what your activity was within that day. Every movement from the path you take to work to how extreme and often your workouts are is going to be figured into the calculation. To me it’s very mind-boggling that when it comes to this step of the calculation the average person passes it over with very little thought. They pick from one of five basic categories and run with it from there. Here is a sample of those categories through the Harris Benedict equation.

1. If you are sedentary (little or no exercise) : Calorie-Calculation = BMR x 1.2
2. If you are lightly active (light exercise/sports 1-3 days/week) : Calorie-Calculation = BMR x 1.375
3. If you are moderatetely active (moderate exercise/sports 3-5 days/week) : Calorie-Calculation = BMR x 1.55
4. If you are very active (hard exercise/sports 6-7 days a week) : Calorie-Calculation = BMR x 1.725
5. If you are extra active (very hard exercise/sports & physical job or 2x training) : Calorie-Calculation = BMR x 1.9

Now the above categories are not set in stone. You can land somewhere in between activity ratings (ie: 1.44). These little numbers are just telling you that on average this sort of activity done is going to rate this kind of expenditure. This slight little calculation makes up a headache for the majority of people in fat loss. Their calculations of what they do in a day are usually so beyond off that for the majority of them they are landing in overeating or undereating by large degrees. This leads of course to them failing at their goals.

It would make sense then to focus more efforts on creating a method of figuring out the exact caloric amount you’re burning in a day so that your math of in and out are going to be as close to accurate as possible. There are some methods of doing this technologically but they can be costly and not very practical.

So what then is the easiest method (not to mention the most correct) of figuring out what we burned in a day? Quite simply, trial and error. The problem comes into focus because most trainees trials are full errors in technique.

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