Starting your fitness journey can be overwhelming: you have to create time to work out, choose your workouts, and eat in ways that correlate with your fitness goals. Depending on your goals, you would aim for either a calorie surplus or deficit. There’s also the option of maintaining your current calorie intake.
If you’ve reached the point in your fitness journey where you must track calories, you are probably familiar with online calorie calculators. They can be instrumental in achieving your fitness goals, but are they accurate? Let’s find out!
Online Calorie Calculators and How They Work
Online calorie calculators estimate how many calories you need to eat daily to maintain your current weight. These tools require you to input information about yourself: age, height, weight, sex, and activity level.
They use this to decipher how many calories you burn daily, which, at the most fundamental level, is the same as how much you can eat to avoid weight gain or loss. For example, Mayo Clinic’s calorie calculator first requires you to input your age, height, weight, and sex.
Afterward, you have to choose your activity level from the following options: inactive, somewhat active, active, and active. Next, you just have to click calculate, and you get an estimate of how many calories you need for maintenance.
Basal Metabolic Rate and Total Daily Energy Expenditure
Your basal metabolic rate (BMR) represents how many calories your body needs to perform essential activities while at rest. Examples of such activities are muscle repair and digestion. Calorie calculators use height, weight, and other parameters to estimate your basal metabolic rate (BMR).
Metabolism is the body’s highest means of energy expenditure, not exercise. So, your BMR is the most important metric that calorie calculators use. However, exercise helps a lot, as it not only burns extra calories but also increases your metabolism. This is where total daily energy expenditure (TDEE) comes in.
TDEE represents all the energy you burn in a day. Calorie calculators estimate this number by combining your BMR and activity information. With that knowledge, you can eat more or less, depending on whether you want to lose or gain weight.
Can You Trust Online Calorie Calculators?
Calories calculators are great online fitness resources for achieving your fitness goals. They are particularly helpful for beginners trying to restrict or up their calories for the first time and have no clue how to. However, they have their limitations.
First, online calorie calculators are not personalized. Some factors that affect calorie expenditure, such as genetics, can be quite specific from person to person, so a one-size-fits-all approach is not expedient.
Additionally, calorie calculators do not take body composition into account. Muscle tissue burns a lot more calories than fat. So, as the Mayo Clinic reports, a heavily muscled person with the same weight as a person with more fat would have a higher BMR.
Most calorie calculators have activity levels that are too broad to figure out calorie expenditure accurately. “Inactive, somewhat active, active, and very active” does not cut it.
Lastly, calorie calculators ignore nutrient intake. Tracking nutrients is just as important as tracking calories, if not more. Therefore, it is essential to adequately spread your nutrients across your calorie consumption, at least the macronutrients: protein, fat, and carbohydrates. Simply tracking calories will not help you achieve your goals optimally.
So, do all these demerits mean you should not use calorie calculators? No. However, you should only use them as a guide. In the end, you must pay attention to your body and watch it respond to what you feed it. Losing or gaining weight involves other measures like tracking your diet with an app and monitoring progress regularly to ensure you’re on the right track.
Go Ahead and Google “Calorie Calculator”
A calorie calculator will give you something to work with on your journey to lose or gain weight through calorie counting. These calculators may not be perfect, but they’re usually close. So, listen to your body and respond accordingly. As long as you’re getting closer to your goals, the calories do not really matter.