Learn how many calories you burn every day

Every month, 9.9k of you Google ‘how many calories do I burn a day’, and TBH, the advice you’ll find is so conflicting that you probably end up more confused than when you started your search. The reason for this is that there’s no one-size-fits-all answer, but, according to Dr Luke Powles, clinical director for Bupa Health Clinics, there are a few ways to work out a roundabout answer to how many calories you burn in a day.

Before we go any further, though, a reminder: there’s so much more to a healthy lifestyle than calorie-counting, like how nutritious the foods you’re getting those calories from are, and your mental health – is calorie-counting making you stressed or anxious?

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That said, calories (i.e. the energy unit within food and drink) can be a useful resource. In fact, the NHS recommend a calorie-counting diet if you want to lose weight through a calorie deficit in a sustainable way, and pairing that with an understanding of how many calories you burn in a day could help you see results sooner. So, here’s everything we asked Dr Powles, from a handy formula for working out how many calories you burn a day, to why the number of calories you burn a day changes.

According to Dr Powles, there are a few factors involved in how many calories the average woman burns a day, including:

• Resting metabolic rate (RMR): ‘The amount of energy (a.k.a. calories) your body uses to maintain basic functions like breathing and circulating blood. This is influenced by your age, weight and gender, and typically accounts for 60-75% of the number of calories you burn in a day.’
• Non-exercise activity thermogenesis (NEAT): NEAT exercise is the amount of energy your body uses to do ‘physical activity that isn’t deliberate exercise, like gardening and walking from room to room, which usually burns between 100 and 800 calories per day’.
• Exercise: The amount of energy your body uses during workouts.
• Thermic effect of food: The amount of energy your body uses to ‘chew, digest and store food’.

Dr Powles explains that this typically totals 1800-2000 calories, which is why the NHS advises the ‘average woman’ should aim to consume around 2000 calories a day, as a maintenance rate. Burning more calories than you consume, meanwhile, would leave you in a calorie deficit, which would lead to weight loss, and taking in more than you burn would result in a calorie surplus, and therefore weight gain.

Your ‘how many calories do I burn a day’ calculator

If you want to get more specific, it’s a matter of breaking your day down into each category of activity. Each ‘activity can be measured in metabolic equivalents of task, also known as METs,’ Dr Powles explains. You could do a quick Google for the MET value of your chosen form of exercise, but here are Powles’ numbers for some popular forms of workout.

• Brisk walking (3-4mph): 4 METs
• Steady strength training: 7 METs
• Tennis: 8 METs
• Skipping or running: 12.3 METs

The MET for resting or sitting still is 1; the more vigorous the activity, the higher the MET.

Then for Dr Powles formula:

METs x 3.5 x (your bodyweight in kg) ÷ 200 = calories burned per minute.

As an example, if you weigh 73kg and play tennis for an hour, which has a MET value of 8, the formula will work as follows:

(8 x 3.5 x 73) ÷ 200 = 10.2 calories per minute. 10.2 calories x 60 minutes would burn around 613 calories.

If you weighed 73kg and didn’t do any exercise all day, you’d use the METs value for sitting still, which is 1:

1 x 3.5 x 73 ÷ 200 = 1.3 calories per minute, which equates to 77 calories per hour, or 1,848 calories per day.

To work out the total number of calories you burn a day, you’d need to do this calculation for every form of activity you do, then add those to the total number of hours you spend resting or sitting still.

All these numbers getting a bit much? Dr Powles advises that you can also use online calorie calculators, like Bupa’s, to work out your energy expenditure easily.

But, why is the number of calories I burn a day always different?

Even if you did the exact same activity (deliberate and NEAT) and ate the exact same meals across two days, you’ll probably never burn the same number of calories in a day. ‘This is because your body will never process food in the exact same way,’ explains Dr Powles. ‘If your muscles need more energy in the form of protein, you’ll burn more calories than if they didn’t, for example.’

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He adds that your body composition also plays a part, and this is always changing. ‘The amount of muscle compared to fat you have is always changing, which influences how many calories you burn in a day – if you have more muscle, you’ll burn more calories in a day than someone with less muscle because muscle is more metabolically active than fat, meaning that they burn through calories at a faster rate.’

OK, and how does my gender affect how many calories I burn a day?

‘Women generally burn less calories than men,’ Dr Powles tells us. ‘This is because men tend to have a naturally lower body fat percentage and more muscle than women of the same size as them. And, as mentioned, muscle is more metabolically active than fat.’ As with most things, this can’t be applied universally – not every man will burn more calories than you per day, but it’s worth noting if it’s something you’ve picked up on.

Any last thoughts?

‘Though weight is an important health factor, it should work in tandem with other lifestyle factors,’ Dr Powles says. ‘For example, you wouldn’t necessarily refer to someone as healthy if they were a healthy weight, but they also smoked, binged on alcohol and didn’t sleep enough. Health comes in many forms, and it’s important to take care of all elements.’

Our advice? Don’t let calorie-counting take over. Working out how many calories you burn in a day every now and then to help you see if you’re consuming enough to build muscle or if you could do with scaling back to lose weight is all well and good, but if it starts to jeopardise either your mental or physical health, take a break.

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