What is Calorie Counting?

What is Calorie Counting?

Various weight loss and diet plans & programs utilise this to help you to establish your energy intake and expenditure levels. By calorie counting, you can determine exactly how much exercise you may have to do to ensure you burn off excess energy which would otherwise be stored as fat in the body.

By balancing out this figure, it is possible to maintain a healthy weight as you can effectively use up the energy that you gain through your diet. It is important to use calorie counting to ensure you dont lose too much weight as well. This can occur if your energy intake is lower than your expended energy. Weight loss programmes such as Weight Watchers UK use this method to help members to lose weight and sustain weight loss and control.

What Are Calories?

A calorie is a unit used to measure the energy in food and drink or calories consumed and calorie counting can be used as part of a diet plan to ensure you only eat a certain quantity of them. The energy used by the body is called calories expended. The number available in each type of food depends on the amount of the relative proportion of fat, protein, carbohydrate and alcohol in food. Or example, fat has 9, protein 4, carbohydrate 3.4, alcohol 7 and water contains no calories per gram of food. We constantly use them in the body for everything from breathing to walking. As we use up our energy, we need to increase our food intake to accommodate for this.

Extensive exercise therefore uses up more energy than simply resting so you may feel hungrier afterwards. The rate and efficiency in which we use energy depends upon age, weight, gender, fitness and levels of activity. It has proven to be a very useful way of establishing the exact figures with which you need to work. For example, it is very simple to calculate, using information on food labels, the actual number of calories consumed each day.

It is therefore very straightforward to work out whether or not you need to try and lose weight or gain weight. It also provides you with a key indication as to your weight trends ad can hep you to appreciate which foods contain the most energy and fat and which are the healthiest for you to eat. Weight loss and sustainable weight control are achievable but only through the combination of taking regular physical activity and eating healthily.