What is a calorie?

Do you ever wonder what calories are? When everyone talks about how we need to count our calories or watch how many calories are in food we eat, or we need to burn so many calories when we workout, what does all this mean?

I’m going to keep this as simple as possible and not dive down the chemistry rabbit hole of explaining calories but for our purposes, calories are simply a unit of measurement for energy. Food has energy in it that we need to consume so that our body can use that energy as fuel to keep us alive.

Everyones’ body is different, but we roughly need 10 calories per pound of body weight to function (that will vary). The amount of calories your body burns while at rest (resting metabolic rate) or with basic function (basal metabolic rate) is what we refer to as your metabolism. The faster your metabolism is, the more calories your body burns at rest to just stay alive. And the slower your metabolism is, you burn less calories. This can be changed!

If we consume more calories then our bodies need for basic function for our metabolism (RMR or BMR) then you will “save those calories for later” as stored energy or stored fuel in the form of body fat. If you under consume what that caloric need is (eating in a caloric deficit) then you will use your own stored body fat as fuel (however that can get a little more complicated, you don’t want to starve yourself and not all calories are created equal- I’ll explain further in the next blog post about Macronutrients). If you consume right around what that caloric need is for your current body weight then you won’t store body fat or burn it, you simply stay the same.

In keeping this simple, stored body fat is stored calories or stored energy. Those calories just need to be used to get rid of them. Let’s use an example calculation to understand this further (these are rough numbers and rough estimates- of course different circumstances yield different answers):

200lb person x10 = 2,000 calorie diet (estimating roughly the RMR) *Add exercise and movement to burn stored body fat

This person’s goal weight is 150lbs which means there are 50lbs of body fat sitting on their body as stored energy that needs burned off. That is 175,000 calories sitting on their body as body fat that needs burned off in order to reach their goal.

I will be breaking calories down a little more for you on my next blog post! There’s a little more that goes into the equation of being more successful at efficiently burning body fat!

Jodi Mallory