Popular Myth: Weight Loss Is Influenced by Calorie Types
It’s all over the Internet . . . this crazy idea that calories come in “types.”
I’ve seen an article that actually classifies the calorie types. This person would have us believe that there are fat calories, carbohydrate calories and protein calories. Another warns you of the woes that may befall you if you don’t know your “calorie types.”
We are talking about people who are doing serious time in la-la land here.
To give you some perspective here, we use inches to measure length, pounds to measure weight and calories to measure energy.
Since calories measure energy, talking about types of calories is as senseless as taking about types of inches, or types of pounds.
We can however, talk about things like the amount of energy in food. We can also talk about the amount of energy you burn when you perform some task, such as walking, raking leaves of shoveling snow.
In both of these cases, we would talk about the amount of energy involved using the word “calories.”
Different foods contain different amounts of energy. In the same way that it takes way more feathers to make a pound than it does of coal, it takes way more celery to hold 200 calories than it does of chocolate.
This fact lays the foundation for some diets and it is also the basis for long term weight control. The feeling we have when we feel “satisfied” after eating is actually quite complex – too complex for us to go into here.
But I can say that the relationship between volume of food and number of calories is very important when it comes to weight control. If we can find foods that supply large quantities but small numbers of calories, we stand a better chance of feeling satisfied while not gaining (and maybe even losing) weight.
The notion that there are “types” of calories needs to be replaced with the idea that different foods contain different amounts of energy.
And we now know that to lose fat, we need to burn more calories than we eat.