Basal Metabolic Rate

Woman jogging with dog,full length

Calories and the Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR)

The first step a practitioner should take in order to give nutritional guidance is to determine the patient's daily caloric needs.  This is an extremely important factor as both under and over consumption of calories can greatly harm a patient's health and slow the healing process.  An appropriate nutrition plan should have enough calories to balance energy expended and provide sufficient calories for growth, development, and healing throughout the lifecycle.  Current studies have shown that most American diets consist of too many calories.  It is important to note that dietary factors are associated with five to ten leading causes of death, including coronary heart disease, certain types of cancers, stroke, non-insulin dependent diabetes mellitus and atherosclerosis.

A calorie in simple nutritional terms is the energy potential of a food.  Energy is of critical importance to acupuncturists as we work with Qi, also a form of energy.

The first step to determine how many calories a patient needs is to determine their basal metabolic rate (BMR) which is the rate at which the body uses energy while at rest to keep vital functions going.  In other words, the BMR determines how many calories someone burns doing nothing, like watching TV all day.

Basal Metabolic Rate Formula

For example, your patient is a 35 year old female who is 140 pounds and 5 feet 5 inches tall.  You would first convert feet to inches, so 5 feet 5 inches would be 65 inches total (1 foot = 12 inches). Next, insert her stats into the formula:

Your patient has a BMR of 1405 calories;  she needs to eat 1405 calories just to maintain all of her body's functionings.  An easier way to determine someone's BMR is to use an online calculator.