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Data You Need to Reach Your Fitness Goals

Whether you’ve come here from our Jump-start Guide or you’re just looking for the data you need to keep track of your fitness progress, here are the tools to calculate your calorie intake, estimated bodyfat percentage, and more.

Find your BMR (Caloric Needs)

  1. Go to http://www.bmi-calculator.net/bmr-calculator/ and enter your current accurate age, weight, height, and gender.  Do not use your goal weight or a fudged weight – that will only slow down your progress!
  2. Take the number that you received and multiply it by 1.2.  This is your BMR (basal metabolic rate), or the number of calories you burn being alive every day – blinking, breathing, and maybe getting out of bed a few times. (Technically it’s your BMR * an activity factor, but I’ll be happy to answer any questions you have about these calculations if you reach out to me.)
  3. (This step is best supervised by a health professional – my advice is just general guidance and may not be right for your specific needs).  If you are trying to lose bodyfat, plan to get moving for at least 3 hours each week and subtract about 250 from the number from step 2; the remaining number is your daily calorie goal.  As long as you are eating nutritiously and meeting your goal, this should be a good starting point to lose 2-7 pounds per month, depending on your starting bodyfat percentage.

Example:

  1. If I am 29 years old, female, 5’5″, and 150 pounds, the calculator gives me 1477 calories.
  2. 1477 * 1.2 = 1772
  3. 1772 – 250 = 1522, so I should stay between about 1500 and 1600 calories per day to lose bodyfat.

Estimate your Bodyfat Percentage

If you have a scale that measures bodyfat or a bodyfat measuring tool like the one we have at the Tiny Fitness studio (or you want to stop by the studio for an assessment!), you can use that to measure your bodyfat percentage.  If you live near any grocery store or drugstore, you can also use their in-store machine – the blood pressure machine can now weigh you (let it weigh you so that your percentage results are accurate) and calculate your bodyfat percentage, as long as you don’t have a pacemaker or another reason not to get zapped with a mild electrical current.

If you don’t have access to any of those tools, take some measurements (grab our printable tape measure as part of our jump-start guide if you need to) and plug them into this calculator: https://www.active.com/fitness/calculators/bodyfat

If you don’t know why you should care about this number or why it’s more important than the scale, read this post.

Take Your Measurements

You can get our printable tape measure in our free jump-start guide (along with fitness plans for losing weight, running your first 5k, and more).