Have you noticed it? There is a bunch of information on the Internet about “calorie types.”

There are articles out there going on about “what kind of calories to eat to lose weight” or “why you should be aware of calorie types.” I saw one that goes into the “fact” that there are 3 types of calories – protein, fat and carbohydrates!

We are talking about people who are doing serious time in la-la land here.

Calories are not things. You can”t see them and you certainly can’t eat them! What is a calorie then” It is the energy required to raise the temperature of a gram of water 1 degree Centigrade.

Since a calorie is a measurement of energy, it makes about as much sense to talk about carbohydrate calories vs. fat calories as it does to talk about red inches vs. green inches. An inch is an inch and a calorie is a calorie.

We can however, talk about things like the amount of energy in food. We can also talk about the amount of energy you burn when you perform some task, such as walking, raking leaves of shoveling snow.

When we talk about the energy in food or the energy used up by an activity, we use the word calories to indicate how much energy we are talking about.

Some foods are packed with more energy than others. In the same way we expect a bag holding a pound of feathers to be much bigger than a bag holding a pound of coal, we expect for the same number of calories, the pile of lettuce to be much bigger than the pile of grease dripping french-fries.

This fact lays the foundation for some diets and it is also the basis for long term weight control. The feeling we have when we feel “satisfied” after eating is actually quite complex – too complex for us to go into here.

But I can say that the relationship between volume of food and number of calories is very important when it comes to weight control. If we can find foods that supply large quantities but small numbers of calories, we stand a better chance of feeling satisfied while not gaining (and maybe even losing) weight.

The notion that there are “types” of calories needs to be replaced with the idea that different foods contain different amounts of energy.

Also, if weight loss is our goal, then what we ultimately want to do is burn more calories during the day with our activities than we take in when we eat.

No Comments »

No comments yet.

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URL

Leave a comment