Calorie – It’s Role in Maintaining Our Health

Calorie is defined as a unit of heat energy. It is also defined, as a unit of energy generating potential equal to the amount of heat that is contained in food and released upon oxidation by the body.

Difference Between Chemistry Calorie and Food Calorie

When making the distinction between a food calorie and a chemistry calorie, we must clarify the difference in quantity. The food calorie is equal to 1000 chemistry calories.

Now that we have dealt with the chemical and mathematical analogy of calorie, let’s look at what the calorie means to you, as a food consumer. A calorie is the way we measure the energy potential of food.

Effects of Overeating Calories

It is also the way we determine, if we are eat more and consume too much potential energy for our bodily functions. If we consume too much energy, our body stores it for future use, which makes us become obese.

If we don’t consume enough for our daily use, we can become anorexic. In order to maintain good health, and our ideal body weight, a calorie requirement that is specific to our unique needs must be obtained.

Once we are conscious of what our calorie needs are we can prepare our diet to fit those needs. One of the most difficult circumstances to overcome is that of the need to diet.

Calories – Weight Loss

Once we have decided our calorie requirements, if we also need to diet and lose our weight, we are faced with cutting our calorie intake. Having been slightly overweight most of my adult life, I can tell you this is a difficult fight.

Combining the need for fewer calories, and the increased need for exercise, is often an intimidating task for an individual. It is also a very difficult task to maintain. There are products available in the market today that make calorie counting easier than ever.

There are diet plans that make replacement of diet foods easier than ever. What they have not invented is a way to increase the will power, which would make the fight easier than ever.

Counting the Calories

Those products are worn on some body parts, and tabulate for us what our calorie expenditure is during the day. What we need is to take this one step further, and have an instrument that can also calculate our calorie intake and leave us with our available consumption balance.

If you eat more, there could be a warning sound from the calorie counter. If the sound were quite embarrassing, you wouldn’t have to worry about people who overeat. The road to good health is not an easy one for most.

It should be one of the easiest things we have to do, since good health is something we should have spent a lifetime incorporating into our daily regime. But what we find most of the time is that we spend very little time for our health, and even less time for our understanding of the calorie and its effect upon our body.

When we do take notice of the bugle around the waist, we want the quick fix for the problem, diet and exercise are two difficult and take too long. But they are the only substitutes that work.

So as you go about your day, think about the calorie. Think about what it means to your waistline and your health. Proper understanding, consumption levels, and a maintenance plan make for a healthy, high quality life.