You are wasting your time using an RMR Calculator (or BMR Calculator)
I’m sure you’ve heard that “all you need to do is reduce your calorie intake by 500 calories every day” and you’ll lose weight steadily and easily — and what better starting point than a RMR calculator (which stands for resting metabolic rate).
The idea is that you figure out (or calculate using the RMR calculator) what your basal metabolic rate is, and then start counting calories in and making sure that you always burn 500 calories more than you put in!
(if you want some help with that, we’ve got a series of 4 free videos that show you great tips like
- when and what to eat to stop your body from storing fat
- how to melt fat at a super-human rate
- 4 tips on how to get into a great shape fast
- how to eat great tasting meals without going hungry
Here’s why you have to be super-careful when using an RMR calculator you find online
The problem is this: the metabolic rate calculators you find online are all based on a scientific formula which calculates your resting metabolic rate as follows:
Women: BMR = 655 + ( 4.35 x weight in pounds ) + ( 4.7 x height in inches ) – ( 4.7 x age in years )
Men: BMR = 66 + ( 6.23 x weight in pounds ) + ( 12.7 x height in inches ) – ( 6.8 x age in year )
As you can see, the formula contains your weight and your height and your age and your gender.
Obviously, this is more accurate than using just your body weight alone.
Here’s the first problem with the various types of RMR calculator you find online
For some reason, even with a simple formula as you see above, the different websites that have metabolic rate calculators come up with different results.
Here’s one example from one site:
And here is another one which I got from WebMD:

As you can see, for the “Inactive” activity level (which is the lowest level you can get), the WebMD RMR calculator delivers results that are almost 300 calories higher than the previous calculator (incidentally, the formula above comes up with 1965.95 calories burned every day when doing nothing). So, in this the WebMD calculator is way off.
Remember the 500 calories per day rule? Well, if you’re 300 calories off because you’re relying on a faulty RMR calculator, well, you can count calories all day long and you’ll be getting nowhere!
So, simply having incorrect implementations of the RMR calculator is the first reason why you cannot and should not rely on the calorie calculators you find online!
But, it gets worse:
The concept of using an RMR Calculator to compute calories burned is inherently flawed!
You see, the ONE big thing that’s missing here is the biggest component in your body that is responsible for calories burned: the percentage of muscle-mass in your body!
See, in practice, it’s only muscles that burn calories, right?
So, if you’ve got lots of muscle-mass, then you’re burning more calories (even when you’re not moving at all).
And when you have very little muscle-mass (relative to your overall body-weight), well, then you’re burning very few calories.
In practice, the various metabolic rate calculators attempt to “guess” what level of body mass you may have by asking for some sort of activity level.
As you saw in the above WebMD example, for activity level “inactive” you get 2263 calories burned every day (if you’re a 21 year young male…)
Let’s update this to “lightly active” which doesn’t sound too hard:

What’s going on here is that they’re making a big assumption about your body:
the assumption is that if you exercising at a certain “activity level”, then you’ll have a certain percentage of muscle-mass.
In practice, this is of course total nonsense: if you are doing weightlifting 3 times a week, your percentage of muscle-mass will be totally different from e.g. someone who is doing aerobics 3 times a week.
And that is going to be totally different from someone who is doing tai-chi 3 times a week.
All three are doing regular exercise, but the percentage of muscle-mass is totally different.
Making the RMR calculator, even with the “activity level” pretty much useless!
Let us know what your experience is with computing your resting metabolic rate using an RMR calculator and how it worked out for you in practice by leaving a comment below!
In the meantime, remember to check out our free fat-loss videos that help you melt fat fast and easily whilst you can still eat tasty meals and never have to go hungry!:
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