Is It Safe To Eat Under Your BMR?
To put it simply, there isn’t anything inherently harmful about eating under your BMR. This is because your body will respond to this the same way it does to a calorie restriction. Eating under your BMR will just break down more of your body fat in order to keep your organs adequately filled with energy.
One of the common misconceptions with BMR is that the BMR is how many calories your body burns while it is resting, but this is another measure – resting metabolic rate, or (RMR). Your BMR is how much energy your body needs to carry out essential functions, whereas your RMR is how many calories your body burns while it is resting. Your Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) is how many calories it takes for your body to maintain itself while it is resting (if you are not doing any activity).
A good place to start is with a BMR calculator, which will identify how many calories your body needs each day to carry out its essential, life-sustaining functions. Along with your BMR calculator, you will want to estimate how many calories you expend from activities (exercise and non-exercise activities) so that we can determine the amount of calories you require to maintain your weight.
Estimates provide you an estimated amount of calories that you are burning per day with your current activity level; it is how many calories you will need to eat each day to stay at your current weight. This TDEE calculator shows what you should be eating to keep you at your current weight.
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According to the study, you should consume about 15% more calories a day than is needed to keep you at the same weight (that is TDEE). If your TDEE ends up being 2200 calories per day, then you have to consume less calories in order to reach your weight loss. As you make progress with your weight loss, you will have to reduce the calories even more to keep making progress, because your smaller body burns less calories, and your body is adapted to your diet.
| Is it okay to eat below your BMR? | How to lose weight while maintaining your BMR? |
| Eating slightly below your BMR makes you 30% calorie deficit, and with consistency, it causes weight loss. | You can do this by just eating enough calories to maintain your MBR, but you have to add more exercise. |
| Therefore, eating below your BMR is not unhealthy, it simply breaks down more body fat. | Do this 1-2 days where you eat your usual calories (maintaining BMR level) and the next 4-5 days you have to eat lower than your BMR. |
As you continue your weight loss, you will burn less calories through your diet, through your workouts, and through your resting state because of metabolic adaptation. Unfortunately, due to these adaptive responses, a person on a low-fat diet often needs to consume about 5-15% less calories each day in order to maintain their weight and physical activity levels compared to a person who has been at this weight all along. Over time, the longer you remain at a caloric deficit, your body will experience metabolic adaptations, and your rate of weight loss will decrease.
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It is a lot easier to build up a significant caloric deficit when you combine eating less with exercising, since you do not need to starve yourself as much, nor exercise as crazy. A caloric deficit is eating less than what your body needs to sustain itself, and then creating the deficit. As much as being in a caloric deficit (eating less calories than your body needs) is important for losing weight, eating enough calories is important too, so that your body does not have to lower your metabolism faster than necessary.
If you want to lose weight, you should be in a caloric deficit, which means that your daily dietary intake should be equivalent to less calories than you expend. Ideally, you will be eating as many calories as possible, but still losing weight, which leads to better adherence to your diet, and keeps your metabolism from slacking off as quickly. In general, eating more calories than your body needs would make you gain weight, mainly as body fat.
Initially, when you are eating below your BMR, your body will begin using fat as energy, causing you to lose weight. If we start eating above our BMR, our bodies adapt to using that energy. If you eat less calories than your BMR, or eat calories that cause you to have more than your BMR, your body goes into hunger mode. Every time you eat less calories, our metabolism gets held back, slowing our processes because we are in a stress and threata moment, and our BMR goes down.
If you consistently eat less than your BMR, your metabolism slows (stops burning calories as easily) in order to conserve the calories that are coming for body functions. Because your BMR is strongly linked to your lean body mass, any changes in it will impact how many calories you burn. To optimize your BMR to increase lean body mass, you will want to go above and beyond the amount of calories that you require every day. If you lose a little lean body mass due to going on a severe caloric deficit diet, then your BMR decreases.
Eating slightly below your BMR creates 30 percent of the calorie deficit, and with enough consistency, it causes weight loss. If you are eating just enough calories to maintain your BMR, but you are adding in more exercise, you are creating a caloric deficit just from burning the extra calories. The easiest way to do this is with 1 or 2 days a week where you eat your usual calories (maintaining level) and 4-6 days where you are calorie-deficiting, where you are eating less than your BMR.
Unless you are a Natural Bodybuilder trying to achieve a Stage-level of Leanness (7% body fat), you should not have to eat below your BMR to generate a caloric deficit. If you are trying to keep your weight rather than lose or gain, knowing your BMR and TDEE can help you figure out what calories you should be striving for on a daily basis in order to keep weight. Your BMR tells you how many calories you need, and when you take this number plus how many calories you burn every day through regular activities and exercise, you will have your TDEE.
To determine how much calories you are burning, you are going to use the activity multiplier, which is based on how active you are during the day, where you will multiply this number with a 1700 BMR. Let us say based on your age, weight, and height, that specific calorie amount is 1700 calories, and with a little bit of physical activity, you wind up at 2300 calories in TDEE. Do not mistake the TDEE for your REE, which is your energy expenditure if you just lie on the bed all day doing absolutely nothing. Focus on the TDEE at 2,300 calories.
Once you calculate calories, you can focus on cutting calories in ways that help you achieve your fat loss goals. These formulas calculate how much energy you expend each day, which allows you to set your caloric goals in a much more efficient manner.
Knowing your BMR or RMR helps you to more accurately determine the total amount of energy spent per day in order to create a caloric deficit, defined as eating less calories each day than you expend to fuel yourself. Keep in mind, your body burns calories throughout the day as part of your basal metabolic rate (BMR), as your body requires energy (calories) for the essential functions necessary for life – breathing, digesting, circulating, thinking, etc. Of course, this is why stress is so prevalent, and your BMR is basically how much basic energy (calories) your body needs to simply survive. Ok, let us get back to our example.
What happens when you eat below BMR?
In truth, your body reacts to eating less than your BMR in the same way it responds to any calorie restriction; it simply breaks down more body fat to maintain the energy needs of your organs. Therefore, eating less than your BMR is not intrinsically bad or unhealthy.
Will I gain weight if I eat more than my BMR?
You will put on weight if you consume more calories than your body requires for metabolism. In terms of calories, one pound of body fat contains 3,500. Therefore, you will gain one pound every week if you consume 500 calories more than your body requires each day.
How many calories should I eat if my BMR is 1500?
One must ALWAYS consume at or above your BMR, regardless of your objective. You should never consume more calories overall than your BMR. You should never consume less than 1500 calories per day if your BMR is 1500. No matter how much fat you need to lose, if you do, you promote adaptive thermogenesis.