When we think of weight control or weight loss then it is a pretty sure bet that we will think of calories and how many we are consuming, but what is a calorie? Why are so many diets based on calorie control and if we actually new what they were would this help us to understand more about weight control.
A calorie is a unit of heat that is equal to one thousand calories and used to express the output of an organism of the energy value of food.
The quantity of heat produced by the complete combustion of a given mass of fuel.
An amount of food that produces an amount of energy.
So there you go, simple is it not, now that you know what it is do you understand how consuming to many of them and not using them all can make your body put on weight. We might understand if we were all scientists, but what is written above does not really explain it in an easy to understand helpful kind of way.
If we forget the science and the meaning, the fact is that a calorie is a unit of energy and we only associate them with food but calories are present in anything that contains energy. So if we look at this simply, we as humans require energy to survive and we get that from our food and drink. How many calories a particular food contains is really the amount of energy that we are going to get from that food. The body will then use that energy to function.
If we do a lot of exercise then we will need more energy supply and we get that from our food, so as an example if one person runs three miles everyday and they eat the right amount of food to give them the right amount of energy to stay the same weight, which is the right weight for their height and then another person who is the same height does no exercise at all but eats the same amount of food and gets the same amount of energy from it as the first person, do you think they will weigh the same, no probably not. The second person is going to be heavier and be overweight for their height.
So the second person is taking to much energy (calories) into there system through the amount of food they are consuming and not burning enough of that energy off everyday and this is why they are overweight and the first person is the right weight for their height.
This is the simple explanation of how to many calories can and no regular exercise lead to being overweight. So in simple terms a calorie is a unit of energy.
