Healthy meal planning begins with your starting point:

Healthy meal planning begins with your starting point:

Estimate your daily caloric needs. Your daily calorie needs (also called Weight Maintenance Calorie level) in simplified terms is the sum of your basal metabolic energy (also referred to as basal metabolic rate or BMR) and your Activity Energy.

Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR)- Your BMR refers to the energy your body expends performing involuntary functions such as circulating blood, breathing, glandular activity, contraction of the intestines, etc. All these processes require energy. Test data show that the BMR depends on gender, age, height and weight.

Activity Energy & Activity Levels- Your activity level depends on how physically active you are. This leads to the amount of energy you expend over and above your basal energy. What’s your body composition?

Body composition defined as the ratio of lean body mass to body fat mass. Lean body mass includes structural and functional elements in cells, body water, bones, muscles, liver, heart, kidneys, etc. Body fat is of two types such as essential fat and storage fat. Essential fat is required for normal physiological functioning. Storage fat constitutes the fat reserves of the body. Body composition is the percent of body fat mass and percent of lean body mass.

What’s your BMI? Another accurate judge of body weight is BMI, which stands for Body Mass Index. BMI calculates a weight to height ratio and assigns a number to the result. The higher the BMI number above the normal range, the greater the degree of overweight. A BMI of 27 or above is overweight and 30 or above is severely overweight. The higher the BMI number above the normal range, the greater the degree of overweight and the greater the risk for weight related health problems.


What’s your body fat? This is the amount of body fat you carry, your body fat percentage, makes a difference to your body shape and your health.
Your physique is affected by body fat percentage because muscle tissue is more compact than fat - a balloon containing 1lb of muscle tissue would be smaller than a balloon containing 1lb of fat!

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