What is BMR and why is it important to know?

BMR, or Basal Metabolic Rate, is the number of calories your body needs just to keep you alive: breathing, circulating blood, maintaining body temperature, and carrying out all the basic functions that happen even when you’re at complete rest. It’s essentially the minimum energy requirement your body has each day.

Knowing your BMR is important because it gives you a foundation for managing your nutrition. If you eat fewer calories than your BMR, your body won’t have enough fuel for basic functions, which can slow down your metabolism and lead to fatigue or muscle loss. By knowing this number, you can make sure you’re eating enough to stay healthy while still adjusting your intake for weight loss, maintenance, or muscle gain.

Once you know your BMR, you can build on it depending on your activity. This is where TDEE (Total Daily Energy Expenditure) comes in: TDEE is your BMR plus the calories you burn through daily movement, exercise, and digestion. Some people prefer using BMR as their baseline and then adding exercise calories on top, so they can track activity separately and adjust their intake more precisely day by day.

If you don’t always exercise or be as active as indicated in the calculation, you can go with the BMR instead of TDEE. Then each time you burn calories through exercise you can track those burned calories separately and add those to your BMR to get you maintenance calories for the day.

Welling is an AI weight loss coach that uses your TDEE and your BMR and automatically sets your daily targets, whether your goal is to lose, gain, or maintain weight. Through a simple AI chat, it then tracks your calories and analyzes your diet so you know exactly how to reach your goals.