What You Need To Know About Calories

Time for reading: ~2 minutes Last Updated: October 11, 2022

In this article, learn more about What You Need To Know About Calories. Do you need to count calories to lose weight?.

Healthy egoism prompts us to constantly monitor our appearance and meet imposed standards of beauty. Instagram bloggers organize marathons against sugar, self-proclaimed nutritionists suggest creating a menu with a deficit of calories for instant results, and various applications signal the excess of the daily limit of kilojoules. However, few people think about what calories are and whether it is necessary to monitor their number so carefully in order to get rid of excess weight. Let's learn more about calories , their quantity and quality.

What it is

It is known from the physics textbook that calories are the amount of heat that allows heating 1 g of water by 1 degree Celsius at standard atmospheric pressure. The average person is rarely interested in how much heat their body absorbs, and calories themselves did not enter our lives to surround us with warmth. Calories in 1990 became part of the idea of the American authorities on labeling, which obliges manufacturers to indicate the calorie content of products and their composition on all packages, in order to fight the problem of excess weight in the country. Much later, in 2008, restaurants in New York began to indicate the energy value of dishes on the menu, a few years later, in the wake of the popularity of the healthy food movement, people began to carefully calculatecaloric content of your diet and avoid certain products . In principle, calories have lost their original meaning and have become the main enemy of all those who lose weight.

Why you don't need to count calories

There are several formulas for calculating your daily calorie intake . However, all these calculations and careful monitoring of the number of calories does not guarantee that you will actively lose weight. This system does not take into account the expenditure of energy for digestion: the assimilation of different foods consumes different amounts of calories . That is, we gain weight not from the number of calories , but from what we eat. 300 kcal of avocado is not the same as 300 kcal of chocolate.

There are also confirmed data that different components consume different amounts of calories for digestion. Fats are absorbed the fastest, then carbohydrates, and proteins are the worst. The greater the proportion of protein in food , the higher the costs of digestion. A 1987 study found that people who ate a high-fat diet gained the same amount of weight as those who ate almost 5 times more calories from carbohydrates.

Another argument in favor of abandoning useless calculations: not only the chemical composition of the product is important , but also its physical state. The costs of digesting raw food are much higher than those of cooked or fried food.

What You Need To Know About Calories

What it is

Why you don't need to count calories

Related Articles

Top Nutrition Articles Today