Whats a caloire?

Do you know EXACTLY how much energy you put into your body? Or even how much energy you expend?

I say this because I too, used to tear up about getting too many calories.

Calories is such a lame term - a calorie is a metric unit of energy. 200 calories = 200 units of energy for your body to burn - granted saturated fats and different kind of foods are more at risk for you to have gunk trapped into your arteries. When you ingest food it is much like putting coal into a engine - or gas - or wood. It is all energy. Just like the engine when you workout you need to add more "coal" to your body, because the calories are burned up. When we don't move for extended periods of time, the body stores fat - just like if you kept piling coals into an engine while the engine is off, the coals will pile up when not used. When you start the engine again, and add smaller amounts of "coal" (food) to your diet, you burn what you had built up, and have a stable amount and continue to burn the fat - or run the engine.

Most of us think of calories in relation to food, as in "This can of soda has 200 calories." It turns out that the calories on a food package are actually kilocalories (1,000 calories = 1 kilocalorie). The word is sometimes capitalized to show the difference, but usually not. A food calorie contains 4,184 joules. A can of soda containing 200 food calories contains 200,000 regular calories, or 200 kilocalories. A gallon of gasoline contains 31,000 kilocalories.

http://health.howstuffworks.com/wellness/diet-fitness/weight-loss/calorie.htm

What about digestion?

Digestion is difficult to study. It is hard to make participants, even college students, eat, say, nothing but raw beef for several days. Carmody and her colleagues circumvented this problem by studying mice; they monitored the weight of mice fed different diets. The mice are secretive about their digestion too though so Carmody had to measure how the mice moved and how much weight they gained as an indication of the amount of energy that was not being lost through inefficiency as feces. All things equal, the bigger the mice got on a given diet, the more calories they were getting. Carmody fed adult, male mice organic sweet potatoes (to, in essence, retest what was already known) or organic, lean beef. These foods were served up raw and whole, raw and pounded, cooked and whole, or cooked and pounded. The standard system of calories, the one used to put the numbers on the food you buy in the store, assumes (and hence also predicts) these have no effect on calorie content; but would they? The mice were allowed to eat as much as they wanted and how much they consumed was closely monitored (Carmody had to pick each and every bit of uneaten food up from inside the cage). The mice on the different diets got about the same amount of exercise. They all had a wheel to run on, and they did not differ one treatment to the next in terms of how inclined they were to take a jog. They did differ, however, in how much they weighed at the end of the study. As predicted, mice lost more than four grams of weight on raw sweet potatoes, but gained weight when given cooked sweet potatoes (whether or not they were pounded). But what about meat? Cooked meat was easier to digest. The mice lost 2 grams of body mass on raw meat but just 1 gram on cooked meat. In retrospect this does not seem surprising. Heat denatures proteins and makes them easier to digest. Heat also kills bacteria and might decrease the immune cost of eating meat by reducing the work the immune system has to do which allows the body to make, well, more body for a given number of calories

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2012/08/27/the-hidden-truths-about-calories/

What about your exercise?

In "Energy Expenditure of Walking and Running," published last December in Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, a group of Syracuse University researchers measured the actual calorie burn of 12 men and 12 women while running and walking 1,600 meters (roughly a mile) on a treadmill. Result: The men burned an average of 124 calories while running, and just 88 while walking; the women burned 105 and 74. (The men burned more than the women because they weighed more.)

http://www.runnersworld.com/weight-loss/how-many-calories-are-you-really-burning-0?page=single


The debate on "higher calorie menus' - companies putting calories n menus that could be 100 off or 200 more than what it says shouldn't matter. You don't receive the same amount of calories from the same amount of food as another person does, and you don't burn the same as another. We are all different. Weight more, move more, sit more. I was one to fret daily and hourly over the calorie. That *kitten* calorie.

I have now accepted the simple and plain truth - calories are energy, and they always will be. That's what it is, and what it was meant to do, give energy. Since moving, lifting, running and being active I still count and track what I eat, but I do so freely, meaning no planned cheat meals, no feeling bad for going a few over, because you really dont know what you are getting. Thats why people say do something for a month and if you dont like results, eat more/less. I have been eating pretty much the same for a long time now, and my body is changing how I want it based on how much/how little I eat.


This is open to debate, of course, but I truly believe that calories are not the enemy (even the types of food choices) or even corporations maniacally placing more fuel in the food for the human cattle to fatten us up and to destroy us all.

Energy in < Energy out and you will be fine.