Counting Calories

Despite all the diet strategies out there, weight management still comes down to the calories you take in versus those you burn off. Forget the fad diets. You have to create a healthy eating pattern that will stick with you for life.

Calories: Fuel for your body
Calories are the energy in food.

Carbohydrates, fats and proteins are the types of nutrients that contain calories and are the main energy sources for your body. The amount of energy in each varies.

Calories per Gram-

Carbs and Protein=4

Fat=9

Alcohol= 7

Regardless of where they come from, the calories you eat are either converted to physical energy or stored within your body as fat. These stored calories will remain in your body as fat unless you use them up, either by reducing calorie intake so that your body must draw on reserves for energy, or by increasing physical activity so that you burn more calories.

So how many calories do you need? Of course this is different for everyone. It also depends on whether you are trying to maintain, lose or gain weight.

You can plug your information into this calculator to get a very rough estimate of your caloric needs- http://www.ahealthyme.com/topic/calneed

In general if you are trying to lose weight you will need to cut your calories back somewhere between 1200-1600 calories a day. I will discuss this in more detail in a later blog post.

The problem is counting calories in real life is hard, confusing and usually we don't do a very good job at it. Research has shown that most people underestimate how many calories they consume. These mystery calories are what make the numbers on the scale go up and up.

But this doesn't mean that you shouldn't take the time to figure out you daily calore intake. It just means that you will have to use other tools to keep you on track. For today start keeping a food journal. Even if you are not trying to lose weight a food journal can be very enlightening. Keep track of what and how much you are eating. And figure out how many calories you consumed at the end of the day. You can just use a notebook or if you perfer there are tons of on-line programs for tracking calories. We will discuss where to go from here tomorrow.

~PCFitness