Calories: Helping you with the energy balancing act

You need calories for everything you do. They're nothing complicated - just a way of measuring how much energy there is in food. If you did nothing at all for a day you would still use some calories up just to keep ticking over. The more you move around, the more calories you use up.

A calorie is a unit for energy

A calorie is an (non-official) unit for energy that is often unsed in the food-industry. One calorie is the amount of heat that is needed to increase the temperature of 1 gram of water by 1 °C. More common units for energy are the Joule (in Europe) and the British Thermal Unit (BTU) in the USA.

The unit calorie is used often used wrong. If someone talks about a calorie, they often mean a kilocalorie (kcal), which is a factor 1000 greater.

Your body stores the extra calories as fat

Your body is very clever because when it has spare calories that are being used, it stores them for use later on as fat. Not so clever? Well, if you can roughly match the calories coming in with the calories being used, then not much will get stored as fat. And if you reduce by a small amount the calories coming in, and are more active, then you'll use some of that stored fat and lose some weight.

If you eat 7000 more calories (kcal) than you need in a month you'll be storing it as 1 kilogram of fat.

Where are calories found?

Some foods have lots of calories, others not many at all. If you need to adjust how many calories you eat each day, try some light-products. Fat contains over more than twice as many calories as protein or carbohydrates.

• One gram of carbohydrate contains 9 kcal (= 38 kJ)
• One gram of fat contains 4 kcal (= 17 kJ)
• One gram of protein contains 4 kcal (= 17 kJ)

Sport to use calories

Here are some funny ideas to burn your extra stored fat by sporting:

View this article in Dutch: Calorieën.

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