Register
Sign in17 October 2009
Calories and weight
Bookmark this page:
What are calories?
All food and drink contains calories (kcal) which are essentially units of energy. Your body requires calories, burning them to provide you with the energy required to keep you alive and physically active.
The problem is that if you consume more calories than your body requires, these calories are converted to fat and stored within your body as an energy bank for a rainy day.
The more active you are, the more calories your body requires. A useful analogy is to liken the human body to that of a car engine - the more miles driven, the more petrol combusted!
Without getting bogged down with physics, just appreciate that a calorie is a unit of measurement for energy in the same way that a pint is a unit of measurement of liquid. The number of calories you consume is simply a way of describing the amount of energy your body takes in from the food that you eat and the fluids that you drink.
For those of you who want a short physics lesson, a calorie is actually the amount of energy, or heat that it takes to raise the temperature of 1kg of water by 1°C. End of lesson!
Daily calorie requirement
The UK Department of Health recommends a daily calorie intake of approximately 2,550 calories for men and 1,940 for women. This is a very broadbrush approach, but is a useful guideline for the average man or woman nonetheless.
The reality is that exactly how many calories you need is totally dependent on both your physical makeup and lifestyle. As you change either of these variables, your calorie requirement will also change.
If you register with Purple Weight Loss, you will be able to use our calorie requirement calculator to determine your daily calorie needs?
Weight loss, weight maintenance and weight gain
Firstly it is important to establish that 1lb of fat stored by your body equates to 3,500 calories.
Losing weight
If you consume 3,500 calories less than your body requires over a period of time, 1lb of your body's fat will be broken down and converted to energy to make up for the shortfall in energy supply from consumption. This will lead to you losing a 1lb of body fat.
Maintaining weight
If you match your calorie intake with your daily calorific requirement, you will maintain your weight.
Gaining weight
If you consume 3,500 calories more than your body requires, these calories will be stored by your body as fat - a rainy-day energy bank!
Is calorie counting still a good way to lose weight?
In many men's and women's magazines, every week you will undoubtedly read about the latest fad diet, from the 'baby food diet' to the 'eat nothing after 5pm diet'. Please ignore these fad diets and trust science!
Calories consumed – Calories expended = Weight change
Many people in developed countries such as UK and USA lead increasingly sedentary lifestyles - the 'office-job' or 'desk-job' lifestyle. The reason that these developed nations are facing an obesity epidemic is because this equation is not particularly well known by people, and food and drink consumption is not considered and adjusted with this in mind!