What are Calories?
Maybe you have realized that losing weight isn’t as much about fats and carbs as it is about calories, but you are still a little unclear about what a calorie is.
A calorie is a measure of energy, just like a volt is a measure of electricity. When you imagine burning calories, you probably picture a little pat of butter that you are “melting” away as you run on a treadmill, but it is not that simple or concrete.
How Do Calories Work?
The body needs energy to do anything. The average adult male needs between 2,000 and 3,000 calories a day just to function. If he consumes this amount of energy a day he would maintain his weight. There are so many factors that contribute to the amount of energy you use and consume each day, it is nearly impossible to determine what the “average” is. It changes every day. However, the actual amount of energy consumed per day is a simple formula:
Daily Energy needed = “Amount your body needs” + “Amount your body needs to do extra things”
The amount your body needs is the total amount of energy required to do those things you generally don’t think about – what is needed for your heart to pump, your lungs to fill with air, your body to keep warm, your hair to grow, your stomach to digest food and so on.
This is known as the basal metabolic rate. This is what your body would need at rest. Generally it is the case that the larger you are, the higher your basal metabolic rate is. The basal metabolic rate doesn’t change and everybody’s basal metabolic rate is different.
The amount your body needs to do extra things is equal to the amount of work you do in a day.
The formula is basically: Daily Energy needed = Basal Rate + Work
How Can Calories Help Me Lose Weight?
Let’s just assume that that your basal rate is 1,800 calories a day and that on this particular day you only use an additional 200 calories throughout the day (getting up to pay the pizza guy, change the channel, open the chips, etc.) then our formula is:
Energy Needed = Basal Rate + Work
2,000 = 1,800 + 200
This means that if you keep your calorie intake to 2,000 or lower, you will maintain your weight or even lose weight. However, assuming that you consume:
1200 calories (pizza) + 450 calories (chips) + 480 calories (Coke) = 2,130 calories
This means that you have consumed 130 more calories than you needed. These 130 calories are still in the body and will be stored somewhere. This means fat storage. There are ways to make sure that you consume fewer calories. There are weight loss supplements that are proven to suppress your appetite, ensuring that you are able to burn more calories than you eat.
Conclusion
The only sure way to lose weight is to burn more calories than you can consume. This can be done with diet and exercise or by keeping track of how much you eat. When you stop thinking of calories as fat and start thinking of them as energy, you can use them to your advantage. Use that energy in exercise and in your daily routine, and if you always burn a little more than you consume, you will start seeing your fat stores diminish and you will have the healthy body you want.