Count Your Calories

To this point, I've posted a lot about diet and how to live a healthy life, while mentioning a lot about calories. So now, I'm going to post about what are calories and how it work.

Calories work like fuels for your body, where it burn food in forms of calories so that it can produce energy. Nutritionists measures the sum of heat that our body produces from food metabolism in a unit called kilo-calories (kcal). For example, there are 105 calories in a banana. Therefore, our body can produce 105 calories of energy to do some activities.

image credit to health.howstuffworks.com

At this point you'll probably wonder which food can be regarded as a high-calorie foods. The answer is based on what kinds of nutrition are in those foods. In example, 1 gram of carbohydrates contains 4 calories, 1 gram of proteins contains 4 calories, and 1 gram of fat contains 9 calories.

In other words, one gram of protein or carbs gave more than half of calories in 1 gram of fat. This is why high-fat foods such as fried foods contains more calories than low-fat foods such as vegetables and fruits.

But still, it's not easy to calculate the calories, because foods usually contains many kinds of nutrition. For example, a skinless chicken breast and a burger both contains high protein. However, 100 grams of chicken breast has 140 calories while 100 grams of burger contains 270 calories.

All foods has calories, and all calories produces energy. However, not all calories carry good nutrition such as amino acid, fatty acid, fiber, vitamin, mineral, etc. Some foods even regarded as "zero calories". It's a term for calories with little or no nutrition at all, like granulated sugar and ethanol (aka alcohol in alcoholic drinks). Sugar and ethanol can give some energy, but contains no nutrition whatsoever.

Be wise in choosing your healthy and right calories for your body. If you want to lose weight, the number of calorie-intake should not be more than the energy you use, because the excess calories will be stored as fat. Start counting your calories now!