What are Calories?

What are calories, and how they can help me to lose weight?

A calorie is simply a unit of energy.

Most people tend to associate calories with food, but they actually apply to anything that contains energy.

The technical definition of a calorie is the amount of energy, or heat, that it takes to raise the temperature of 1 gram of water to 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit).

Most people think of calories in relation to food, but the calories on food packages are actually kilocalories (1,000 calories = 1 kilocalorie).

The word Kilocalorie is sometimes capitalized to show the difference.

Human beings need energy to survive, and this energy we get from our food.

When the food that we consume is burned during digestion, it releases a certain amount of heat (energy). The more calories the food contains, the more energy is released when it is burned by our digestion system.

Our bodies burn the calories through metabolic processes, by which the enzymes break the nutrients down into small molecules.

These molecules are transported through the bloodstream to the cells, where they are either absorbed for immediate use or sent to the final stage of metabolism in which they are reacted with oxygen to release their stored energy.

The carbohydrates we consume are broken down into glucose and other sugars, the proteins are broken down into into amino acids, and dietary fats into glycerol and fatty acids.

The number of calories in a food is a measure of how much potential energy that food possesses.

For example a gram of carbohydrates has 4 calories, protein 4 calories and dietary fat 9 calories.

Most foods are a compilation of these three nutrients. So if you know how many carbohydrates, proteins and dietary fats there are in any given food, you know how many calories and how much energy, that food contains.

For example, let us take a food that has 64 grams of carbohydrates, 8 grams of protein and 4 grams of dietary fat, and produces 324 calories of energy.

This would mean of these 324 calories, 256 calories would come from carbohydrates (4 cal x 64 grams), 32 calories would come from protein (4 cal x 8 grams), and 36 would come from dietary fat (9 cal x 4 grams).

Hopefully the question what are calories has been answered by me on this page, and I want to end by saying that counting calories is the most important part of any effective, long term weight loss program.

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