It’s all over the Internet . . . this crazy idea that calories come in “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.
Talking about types of calories doesn’t make any sense, but talking about the quantity of calories does. Some foods are packed with lots of energy, some not. Some activities take lots of energy, some not.
In both of these cases, we would talk about the amount of energy involved using the word “calories.”
Different foods contain different amounts of energy. In the same way that it takes way more feathers to make a pound than it does of coal, it takes way more celery to hold 200 calories than it does of chocolate.
This sort of “food science” is the basis for some diet programs. It should also be one of the cornerstones of your lifestyle eating strategy. When we say we feel “full”, one of the things involved is this idea about the amount of food compared to the amount of calories. There is more to it than just this, but we can”t go that deep in this article.
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.
To recap then, we now know that there’s no such thing as types of calories and that calories are a measure of energy in a food or burned by an activity.
And we now know that to lose fat, we need to burn more calories than we eat.
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