Harrison General Surgery – Jason Harrison, MD, PA

Knowing your metabolic rate can make a big difference in your weight loss success. After all, from a scientific standpoint, losing weight is simple. The key is to cut calories. Whether you have weight loss surgery or simply follow a healthy diet plan, when you reduce your calorie intake below the number of calories your body needs to keep you alive, you lose weight.

But, what is a calorie, exactly? And how can we know the number of calories our bodies need to stay alive?

Understanding Your Metabolic Rate

Your body’s lean mass (its muscles and organs) need energy each day just to keep you going. A kilocalorie-–usually just called a “calorie”-–is a measure of the energy released when something is burned. Since food contains molecules that your body can burn, that energy is expressed in terms of calories. To keep your body functioning, you must take in a certain number of calories in the form of food each day. This is your metabolic rate.

At Harrison Bariatrics, we can use a computerized machine called a metabolic cart to determine how many calories your body burns in an average day.  Some people need fewer calories, others more, to maintain a healthy weight. Before you can take steps to drop your caloric intake–whether through a diet and exercise program, or through weight loss surgery–you have to know how many calories your own body needs to stay alive. The metabolic cart can help.

Determining Your Energy Expenditure

Here’s how it works: First, we enter your data into the system, including your height and weight. Then, we take a reading on your oxygen use while resting as you breathe through a special tube connected to the metabolic cart. Taking into account your individual body mass, the system calculates your resting energy expenditure, or REE. Think of your REE as the amount of energy you’d burn if you were to sit around all day long doing nothing.

It’s easy to see that increasing your REE is vital to losing weight. Fortunately, physical activity increases the amount of calories you burn every day, and thus raises your REE. Regular physical activity-–such as resistance training and aerobic exercise-–also builds lean muscle, which burns calories even faster, and thus increases your REE even more. This is why exercise is so important–not because the exercise itself burns calories, but because exercise builds lean muscle, and the more lean muscle you have, the more calories your burn every day. And the more calories you burn, the more weight comes off!

Taking a Smart Step toward Weight Loss

So, if you want to lose weight–whether or not you decide to have weight loss surgery–it comes down to increasing your activity level and drop your daily caloric intake below what you burn each day, based on your resting energy expenditure. Using our metabolic cart is the best way to find your REE and ensure that you adjust your caloric intake appropriately to lose weight safely. The test takes only ten minutes, and it’s an easy way to get started on your own road to better health. Call our office at 817-419-9200 if you would like to schedule an appointment.