Do you have a weight-conscious friend, or did you encounter a weight-conscious person in the grocery store? If you have, did you happen to hear them blurting out the word “calories” a number of times? Because we hear the word almost too often, we think that we already know the whole truth about calories. Now is the time to know all about calories – the whole truth.
A calorie is a way or a unit of measurement. While miles measure distance and pounds measure weight, calorie measures something else. A calorie is a unit of energy.
Humans need energy to survive, and humans acquire energy by eating or drinking food. Calories measure this energy that is contained within these foods. When a certain food or item in the grocery contains 250 calories, this means that your body will get that much energy from that certain food item.
Overly weight-conscious people sometimes see calories as something to be avoided. But we would like to disagree on that. We need energy for our body to function. Each cell in the body contains these tiny powerhouses called mitochondria which process the energy that we eat in order to promote the survival of the cell. Here’s the truth regarding this matter: we need calories, but too much or too little is bad.
Here’s why:
Our body is a smart thing. It doesn’t process energy which is not the right amount for your activity. It processes a great amount of energy if you are doing exercises, but when you are at rest, it slows down the processing, because there is no need for too much. When the food you eat has calories which exceed the amount that your activity can burn, the energy is stored in the body for future use. And this is in the form of fat. Continuous storing of great amounts of energy as fat can lead to weight gain.
As long as you are exercising in order to use the energy that you ate, there is no problem with gaining weight. Or as long as you are eating just the right amount of energy for your day’s activity, weight gain may not be a problem.
Different kinds of food contain different amounts of calories. Some foods, such as lettuce, contain few calories (1 cup of shredded lettuce has less than 10 calories) while other foods, contain a lot (½ cup of peanuts has 427 calories).
The nutrition label of a food package contains information about how many calories that food contains. It is usually seen at the back of cartons, or at one corner of food packages. The label also distributes its parts into certain components of the food —carbohydrate, protein, and fat, and are often estimated in grams.
To know how many calories are in 1 gram of each food component:
• carbohydrate — 4 calories
• protein — 4 calories
• fat — 9 calories
If you know how many grams of each one are in a food, you can calculate the total calories that the food contains. You would multiply the number of grams by the number of calories in a gram of that food component. For example, if a serving of french fries (about 20 sticks) has 10 grams of fat, 90 calories are from fat. That’s 10 grams x 9 calories per gram.
Calories are really nothing to be afraid of, even when you are trying to lose weight. You just need the right amount in your meals and for your activities. Balance is the key.
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