What You Should Know About Calories

What is a calorie?
What do I need to know about calories?
How many calories do I need?
Does it matter when I eat?
How many calories are in a pound of belly fat?

What is a calorie?

A calorie is nothing more than a measurement of the amount of energy in a food. Scientists calculate calories by burning foods and measuring how much they heat water when they burn. A more complete description can be found on Wikipedia.

When you eat calories they are either used by your body as energy, used to build or repair tissue, or stored for later use. The whole process of metabolism is very complex, and in my opinion not as well understood as we'd like to believe. But basically if you eat more calories than you expend, you will gain weight. If you eat less, you will lose weight. Read more about weight loss.

What do I need to know about calories?

A good place to start is to understand how many calories are in different macronutrients (carbohydrates, fats, proteins):

Why does this matter? Because, as you can see, there is more energy stored in a gram of fat than any other macronutrient. Therefore eating the same weight of different foods will supply your body with different amounts of energy. And, as discussed above, eating too much energy (calories) is the path to weight gain.

How many calories do I need?

Because metabolism is such a complex subject, this isn't an easy question to answer. Most people need somewhere in the range of 2,000 calories per day. However, studies have shown that some people will still not lose weight while eating a mere 700 calories a day. Why? Because their metabolism has entered starvation mode and began conserving calories in every way it can.

The following are a few of the things that can affect your metabolism and how many calories you need:

• Your age, height, weight, and gender
• The amount of muscle you have
• Genetics
• Drugs or medications you take
• The number and size of your meals
• The time of the day
• Your activity level and level of fitness

But you're in luck! I have a handy dandy calorie calculator to estimate the number of calories you need, whether you want to gain or lose weight. Give it a spin!

Does it matter when I eat?

Some studies say no, some say yes. My own personal experience says yes, it does matter. Some rules of thumb are:

Don't eat after 6 pm, which is when your metabolism slows for the night. Your body doesn't require many calories during sleep, and the calories you eat later in the night tend to be more easily stored as fat.

Try and eat smaller, more frequent meals throughout the day. Eat about 5 times, spaced at 3 hour intervals as in the following:

• 6 am
• 9 am
• 12 pm
• 3 pm
• 6 pm

Each meal should be in the 300-500 calorie range, based on your daily calorie needs. (see the calculator above)

How Many Calories are in a pound of belly fat?

Scientifically speaking there are 3,500 calories per pound of fat, regardless of where it is. Sounds like a ton, doesn't it? It is!

What does that mean to you? Do you need to burn 3,500 calories above and beyond what your body needs to live on to lose a pound of fat? Experience tells me the answer is no, and it's because metabolism is so much more complicated than most 'exeperts' will admit.

The best you can do is reduce your calories, exercise like mad, and don't focus too much on the numbers. If you do the work, the weight will come off.