Basic Understanding How Calories Work

Everybody is always looking for the next big thing to lost unwanted pounds. Nobody takes a second to learn why such diet works and nobody takes a second to understand why they relapsed after they stop some fad diet. Well in the simplest form everything is about calories.

We briefly learned about calories in basic health class as kids. Don't remember it? Well they briefly went over it I assure you. What you probably remember is a campaign of how drugs and sexual intercourse are bad for you. America's kids are at an all time unhealthy state of being and it starts with education so they need to not briefly go over basic nutrition.

Back to the topic, a calorie is a measure of energy expenditure by definition. You're saying what does that mean? Don't worry I'm going to break it down in a way much like a children's book. Not due to the fact you won't understand it on a scientific level but because children books always had a way of painting a vivid picture. I feel we can better learn when we have a visual in our heads. I was once told this analogy back when I was first trying understanding nutrition and it's always stuck in my head.

Anything you eat has a certain amount of calories. A car runs on gasoline a human runs on calories. If you over fill a cars gas tank it overflows. Unlike a car if you over fill humans gas tank it version of overflowing is making fat. Our body retains the excess energy for a later date (I know you wish it didn't). When you drive a car without filling the tank it stales. Luckily when we go without having the tank filled we don't come to a complete stop. Instead we start to pull from our reserve energy and burn fat.

If you understand how many calories you need a day, you can put yourself in a calorie deficit. This means you don't consume enough energy so you are forced to tap into your reserve energy or fat. This is the simple basic principle of how you burn fat. The same principle can be used in reverse if you want to gain weight like myself currently.

Yes there are Fats, Carbohydrates and Proteins that is didn't go into. Yes our body is a little more complicated then just what I said about calories. However in math they don't teach you calculus without teaching you basic adding and subtracting first. This is the basic fundamental principle of calories look at this article as your lesson in adding and subtracting. Hopefully the simple visual I gave helped.