Quote:
Originally Posted by SensibleChiefsfan
Here is the link for the formula I used to calculate my daily caloric needs. Now, this factors in excercise... not just BMR.
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No link appears, but still... IMO, it's a bad idea to count exercise in your daily calorie needs. There's a couple of reasons that doing so is a bad idea. The first is that it's much more difficult to accurately determine how many calories you burned versus how many you ate. Even heart rate monitors aren't completely accurate, unless you know and can factor your VO2/max in the caloric equations. The second is that eating below your BMR actually burns fat, while simply eating below what you exercise is more likely to just burn the calories that you've eaten. Even if your goal is to build muscle, it's still much better to eat below your BMR if you have fat to burn. That fat is there for a reason -- energy reserves. Your body will burn that fat and use the extra calories for the energy that you're not eating. Building muscle is far more a function of whether or not you're training it than getting sufficient calories to sustain growth. Your body will still build muscle at a caloric deficit if you're training. Obviously, you can't be in starvation mode (Think: third world countries in Africa starvation mode), but simply eating below BMR won't by itself inhibit muscle growth. If you have sufficient protein intake, you can still eat well below BMR and build muscle.
Just something to think about.