exercise overlap with BMR?

chunky

I wanted to verify how the exercise values are interpreted and used by cronometer. Are they always additive to the BMR, or do they ever replace the BMR?

For instance, there are values for very light activities, like watching a movie or driving. They are suspiciously similar to a number slightly above BMR. If they are intended to be additive, that would indicate that watching a movie for 24 hours would essentially double your caloric requirements for the day, which seems high. However, if they are designed to replace the BMR the relative error for intense exercises would be small, and perhaps unnoticed but for very light ones, it would introduce a larger error.

In other words, if the exercise value was derived by noting that a 200lb man utilizes 211 calories doing some exercise for an hour , and that was the measured total expenditure from an experiment, than the days exertion should be 23 hours of BMR + 211, and not 24 hours of BMR +211. Any insight?

Susan_RD_101

@chunky

The BMR, or basal metabolic rate, is technically the RMR, or resting metabolic rate, and refers to the number of calories your body requires to maintain your current size and normal physiological functioning while sitting at rest, not-moving.

If you were watching a movie for 24 hours, you would need to get up to use the washroom, make food, eat said food, and would likely have a difficult time sitting still for the entire 24 hours. All of this extra movement requires calories and would be added to your BMR.

Kind regards,