joann's health&fitness blog

The government's new interactive food pyramid (www.mypyramid.gov) figures out how many calories you should eat by asking age, sex, and activity level. That is, it estimates calories, it says, and suggests you monitor your weight to see if you should eat more or less. What a novel idea! Anyway, it omits something that is often omitted in figuring calories: how big are you--how tall and how heavy. If you take a couple of 28-year-old athletes, a 110-lb jockey who is 4 ft 10 in. and a 290-lb basketball player who is 7 ft tall, would you expect them to require the same number of calories to maintain a healthy weight? This calculator would. (These things usually presume a 70 kg, or 154 lb individual.)Your basal metabolic rate, the number of calories required to keep your body working, depends on your size. This may be as much as 70% of total calories, with most of the rest devoted to physical activity. You have to get all this right before you figure how many calories to cut to lose weight. Or you can just monitor your weight. Or look in the mirror. Find out more at http://www.healthandfitness.com and http://www.healthandfitness.com/joann, where you can buy my weight training book and learn to raise your metabolism and use up more calories. Work out so you can eat more.