Calorie and Weight Loss

What is Calorie?

Calorie that we will talk about is the food calorie which is capitalized as Calorie to distinguish it from the chemistry calorie, however, this capitalization is rarely observed in practice.

The Food Calorie

Nutritionists measure the energy content of food in "calories" (sometimes capitalized and abbreviated as Cal or sometimes C, or abbreviated kcal as if small calories were being used), where each food calorie represents 4,186 joules. This is equivalent to 1000 of the calories used in chemistry, and thus the food Calorie would be called a kilocalorie if small calories were being used. However, in chemistry calories have been deprecated as a scientific unit of measure in favor of joules, and therefore in common modern usage the word "calorie" usually refers to a food calorie.

This situation provides two ways of talking about the amount of calories in food which look quite different but that express the exact same amount of energy. One may say that dietary fat has nine kilocalories (kcal) per gram, while proteins and carbohydrates have four kcal per gram, or, one may say that fat has nine Calories per gram while carbohydrates and proteins have four Calories per gram.

The amount of food energy in a particular food is measured by completely burning the food in a bomb calorimeter, a method known as direct calorimetry. Dieticians recommend counting calories to avoid obesity. It is recommended to consume fewer Calories required by your body to maintain your body weight. This average calorie intake recommended for weight maintenance depends on age, gender, weight, height and type of daily activities. Averages are situated around 2000 calories for women and 2500 for men. An easy, but not so accurate calculation is that for every 500 less than your normal amount of calories eaten every day you will lose up to one pound (453,6g) per week.

The Physics and Chemistry Calorie

In physics or chemistry, a calorie (abbreviated cal) is a unit of energy that equals the amount of heat necessary to raise the temperature of one gram of water by 1 degree Celsius, at a pressure of 1 atm. This amount of heat depends somewhat on the initial temperature of the water, which results in various different units sharing the name of "calorie" but having slightly different energy values:

• 15 °C calorie (cal15),
• 20 °C calorie,
• 4 °C calorie,
• Mean calorie (0 °C to 100 °C calorie),
• International Steam Table calorie,
• Thermo chemical calorie.

The slight variations in these units can be seen if you convert them to joules. For example, one 15 °C calorie is the amount of energy required to raise the temperature of 1 gram of water from 14.5 °C to 15.5 °C. This is approximately equal to 4.1855 J or 3.968×10-3 Btu. The International Steam Table calorie is approximately equal to 4.1868 J and the mean calorie 4.190 J.

Of these various units, what is most commonly meant by calorie in contemporary English text is the 15 °C calorie.

Weight Loss

Before start losing weight and counting calories you must first calculate the number of calories your body needs everyday. You can use Calorie Calculator in this site or Calorie Counter here.

Counting calories must be included as part of your diet, because when you loss weight is best to know how many calories your food has, and so ensuring that the amount of calories burned each day is more than the amount stored. All nutritionists agree that a healthy low fat diet without counting calories could not exists, so a calorie calculator is a great tool that can help you counting calories easier.

You can control how much you can eat and how it will affect your body by knowing all the time the amount of calories consumed. When dieting and counting the calories you can eat almost anything as long as you do not exceed the number of calories burned every day.

When you eat fewer calories, your body is forced to consume the fat stored to make up the deficit in your calorie count. It is recommended to combine psychical exercises with healthy eating in order to create some calorie shortage.

Visit the Calorie Counter for counting the calorie intake from your meals per day here.

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