Factors that affect our energy consumption

Our energy consumption is well connected with our body structure, metabolisim, our level of movement and being active during the day and our age, gender, length, weight. As you can see there are a lot of different factors that control our bodies consumption of energy.

Basal metabolic rate (500 - 1200kcal)

Its often shortened to BMR. This is the amount of energy our body needs to keep it alive. All our organs need energy, cells to be created or replaced etc. The BMR is responsible for roughly 50-70% of our total energy consumption. The more muscles you have, the higher the BMR is. In other words you can affect the BMR by weightlifting or strength training. A thing that decreases the BMR is age, and that explains why our bodies put on weight when we got older.

Thermogenesis (200-500kcal)

All food and drinks we put into our body cost us energy to break it down. This is what we call thermogenesis and its called this because it raises our body temperature. Roughly 10% of our total energy consumption goes to this process.
Overweight people usually have a lower rate of heat production. Different foods consumes more energy than others to break it down. Protein needs the most energy followed by carbohydrates and least energy is needed to break down fat.

Growth

Children and teenagers consumes a lot of energy when they grow. The same thing applies to people that workout by example strength training. This energy consumption is pretty low comparing to the other factors.

Physical Activity (500-6000kcal)

The level of physical activity can raise your energy consumption significantly. When you move around and especially train, your body burns of a lot of energy. The consumption increases with your weight, the hardness of your physical activity and the length of it.

If your work is demanding physically you could burn more than 1000kcal comparing to a work situation where you are required to sit down all day. Cardio raises the energy consumption substantially and is a great way to get hold of weight gain and obesity.

Muscles that you receive from physical activity as for example weightlifting raises the BMR roughly with 100kcal for every kg of muscles.

Other factors

Could be the use of medicine, nicotine, caffeine, the use of strong spices, stress, anxiety and heath & cold. All these factors could affect the consumption of energy even the composition of the food that you eat or hormone production could be a affecting factor. Even our genes could be playing a hand in our consumption of energy.