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The Calorie

Don't eat ice cream. It has too many calories! At your Blue D dinner yesterday with a drink and desert, you probably consumed 1000 calories and blew your diet. Your trainer tells you, you have to burn at least 300 calories in the exercise session. We are becoming slaves to the calorie. We need to understand this calorie business.

Calorie is a unit of energy. Our body needs energy to function. This energy comes from the food we eat. This is your energy input. We go through our daily routine and perform our chores. The body uses the stored energy to produce the movements. These are the calories you expend; this is your energy output.

Let us discuss the output side of the equation. In order to keep your body functioning, you burn calories even at rest. The circulation of blood keeps you warm, your intestine digest food, the brain consumes calories as you think, plan and so forth. The amount of calories you burn when your body is at rest is called The Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR). These are the calories required to keep you alive if you were to lie in bed for 24 hours. For women, the BMR ranges from 1200 to 1500 calories while for men it is 1800 to 2200 calories. To this, add calories burned for daily routine. Depending on the type of work you do you may burn 300 to 1000 calories. If you go to the gym and work out, you will burn some more calories. Add all these calories and you get your daily calorie burn, your energy output.

Whether you lose or gain weight or stay the same is a matter of balance between energy output and energy input. If you consume (eat) more calories than you burn, you will have excess energy. This excess energy is stored in your body in the form of fat. Say, you have an excess of 200 calories per day. Over the year you will pile up 73000 extra calories (200x365). One kilogram of body weight increase is equivalent to an excess of 7200 calories. So you will gain about 10 kilos per year. Creating the calorie deficit is a tough task. You have to eat less and burn more. It is a slow process. It takes determination and perseverance.

Once you have lost the excess weight you keep your energy input and output in balance and you will maintain your BMI in the healthy range of 18 to 25.