Watching What You Eat – Keeping Tabs On Those
Calories
What Exactly Is a Calorie?
Before we start, what exactly are calories? You hear that word tossed around loosely on so many diets but what exactly are calories and why it is important that you keep track of them?
A simple definition is: a calorie is a measure of heat energy. One calorie is the amount of energy being required to raise the temperature of a gram of water by one degree Celsius. Calories are found in fats, proteins, carbohydrates or alcohol so pretty much everything except water.
A gram of carbohydrates contains 3.75 calories
A gram of fat contains 9 calories
A gram of protein contains 4 calories
A gram of alcohol contains 7 calories
You can see from the above figures that it’s easy to gain weight from consuming foods high in fat and drinking too much alcohol because these items contain more calories than protein or carbohydrates.
Monitoring Your Calories
Up to this point you know how important diet and exercise are with respect to your weight loss. You know that to lose weight you have to eat. Severely restricting your calories to crash diet levels won’t only hinder your weight loss effort but it will damage your body in the process.
You have also learned that when you deprive the body of food it will feed off itself for survival including burning precious muscle tissue which alarmingly also includes the heart. This is why some dieters on extreme calorie restriction diets often die of heart failure because the heart has been broken down and weakened. So please don’t shock your body by starving it.
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