Calories count

I found a great definition of a calorie in a health magazine recently and thought I'd share it with you: a calorie is the amount of energy needed to raise the temperature of one gram of water by one degree Celsius.

Ohhh, I can already tell that you're fascinated. Me too.
Not.

Let's try again: a calorie is the amount of energy in food which your body can use. In the digestive process, nutrients in food are converted to glucose (your brain LOVES glucose!) and used to fuel body functions.

Some nutritionists are fond of saying that regulating weight is a simple matter of "calories in, calories out". This means that your intake of energy, i.e. the food you eat, is balanced by your out-put, i.e. the energy your body expends maintaining itself (also known as basal metabolic or the less strict definition resting metabolic rate) as well as any energy expended through exercise. Remember that calories equal energy at a fundamental form, so the exercising you do represents calories expended.

Following this logic, you maintain your weight if your caloric intake and energy output are equally matched. You lose weight if your caloric intake is less than your energy output. And you gain weight if your caloric intake is higher than your energy output. Unfortunately in our Supersize, 1 portion feeds a family of 5 society, that possibility is all too common.

As an aside, you can have your RMR tested. I did and found it to be useful information. Your RMR is more or less the number of calories your body needs to sustain itself on a daily basis. Then you can look at the number of calories you ingest each day plus the amount of exercise you get. All of this together will give you a good idea of whether your current food and exercise plan
supports your weight goals. You can have your RMR tested for a fee at San Francisco Bay Health's Optimum Health Center. There are other places in the Bay area where you can also have this done.

I won't comment here on whether or not I buy into the calories in, calories out formula. There is hard science underpinning the concept so let's take the statement at face value. It is very easy to inhale a 300 calorie slice of cake (or bag of potato chips) and very time consuming to burn it off running on the treadmill, swimming, walking or on the elliptical. At 10 calories a minute, a pretty good clip, that's 30 minutes.

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news but don't take the calorie counts on those machines as gospel. Those totals are off by a considerable margin if you are not the model human being on which the algorithm was based. Most of us are not in the center of the bell curve here. I wear a heart rate monitor which computes calories expended and rest assured that my totals based on the machine and based on my HRM are often hundreds (!!!!) of calories different. Bottom line: the machines read high (that's false high). Second bottom line: if you've worked out for 30 minutes and the machine reads 300 calories, deduct a quarter to a third. That's more likely your real expenditure, particularly if you're a normal weight woman. Hey, don't shoot the messenger!
Knowledge is power, remember? Maybe next time, you'll have half the slice of cake or the glass of wine.

By the way, it was a woman who came up with the calories in, calories out mantra. Dr. Lulu Hunt Peters wrote a book on calorie counting published in 1918 which became a national bestseller in 1923. I guess it was a lulu of a book!
Sorry, that was way too tempting.
:)

In health,

Laura