Calories description

What are Calories?

In nutrition calories are units of food energy. It measures the amount of heat that is released when you burn food.

Where Calories come from?

Calories most commonly come from carbohydrates, fats, and proteins. However, they also come from ethanol (alcohol) and polyols (sugar alcohols, sweeteners).

When reading food labels remember this chart to get a better understanding of your calorie consumption.

1 gram of Carbohydrates = 4 Calories
1 gram of Protein = 4 Calories
1 gram of Fat = 9 Calories
1 gram of Ethanol (alcohol) = 7 Calories
1 gram of Polyol (sweetners) = 2.4 Calories
As you can see with the exception of polyols, which don’t have much nutritional benefit, carbohydrates and proteins have the smallest amount of calories/per gram. This is why “low fat” diet’s tend to work best when trying to lose weight.

Also, a note about fiber (a complex carbohydrate). It contains less than 4 calories per gram. This is a good thing because you are getting less calories per gram than most other carbohydrates.

How are Calories Burned?

Calories are burned through your metabolism process. The calories are combined with oxygen and energy is release to your body so it can function. Excess calories that are not burned are first stored in the form of glycogen (short term energy reserves). Excess glycogen is then stored as fat (longer term energy reserves).

Calories are burned through diet, exercise, or a combination of both. If you have a weight loss goal, losing weight is simple math. It doesn’t matter where you calories come from, if you burn more calories in a day than you consume you will lose weight.

The average person needs to burn 3500 calories to burn off 1 pound. Another way of putting this is if you burn 500 calories a day you should lose about 1 pound per week.