Assessment of energy requirements in patients with obesity: A narrative review

Obesity is a growing global health concern and clinicians are frequently faced with developing a nutrition care plan for patients with obesity that includes assessment of energy requirements. Although indirect calorimetry (IC) is the gold standard for determining resting energy expenditure, it is not readily available to all clinicians. This review provides an overview of estimating resting energy expenditure for patients with obesity in the inpatient and outpatient settings, including the use of IC and selecting an appropriate predictive equation when measuring energy expenditure is not possible with IC.