What Is a Calorie and Why you Need Monitoring Your Calories

One calorie is the amount of energy being required to raise the temperature of a gram of water by one degree Celsius. Calories are found in fats, proteins, carbohydrates or alcohol so pretty much everything except water.
A gram of carbohydrates contains 3.75 calories
A gram of fat contains 9 calories
A gram of protein contains 4 calories
You can see from the above figures that it’s easy to gain weight from consuming foods high in fat and drinking too much alcohol as they are laden with more calories than protein or carbohydrates.

Up to this point you know how important diet and exercise are with respect to your weight loss. You know that to lose weight you have to eat. Severely restricting your calories to crash diet levels won’t only hinder your weight loss effort but it will damage your body in the process.

You have also learned that when you deprive the body of food it will feed off itself for survival including burning precious muscle tissue which alarmingly also includes the heart. This is why some dieters on extreme calorie restriction diets often die of heart failure because the heart has been broken down and weakened. So please don’t shock your body by starving it.

The approach you should be taking is from a scientific standpoint, don’t worry anyone can do this and you certainly don’t have to be a doctor to understand it.

Make sure you eat from all food groups but eat smaller meals, say 5 to 6 meals per day to keep your energy levels balanced. When we severely restrict calories we jump start our set point to kick in and make us eat. So to avoid that evolutionary mechanism response we need to work in alignment with our body and feed it good food, and frequently. Your body won’t think that it’s being starved or deprived and it will allow you to lose the weight.

So how can we lose weight by eating? By monitoring our caloric intake.Did you know that if you can create a 500 calorie deficit every day from just your diet and exercise that you will be able to lose around a pound of fat per week. I always ask me how many calories should I eat

A pound is great, it doesn’t sound like much however remember how I mentioned before that volume for volume fat by far takes up more room than muscle tissue. That means that every pound you lose you are losing bulk and rolls from your body. This is why that even if you lose 3 pounds of fat that you notice your clothes getting looser because even though muscle is heavier than fat, fat actually occupies more space than muscle does. Keep that in mind when you weigh yourself. The scale isn’t always an accurate reflection of your true fat loss.