Dieting Myth: Weight Control Is Influenced by Calorie Types

Have you come across information on the Internet talking about "types of calories?"

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."

These writers are seriously misinformed!

Calories are not things. You can"t see them and you certainly can't eat them! What is a calorie then" It is the energy required to raise the temperature of a gram of water 1 degree Centigrade.

Since calories measure energy, talking about types of calories is as senseless as taking about types of inches, or types of pounds.

While we can"t talk about types of calories, we can talk about "how many calories." Each type of food contains a different amount of energy. And you burn different amounts of energy when you do different activities.

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 sort of "food science" is the basis for some diet programs. It should also be one of the cornerstones of your lifestyle eating strategy. When we say we feel "full", one of the things involved is this idea about the amount of food compared to the amount of calories. There is more to it than just this, but we can"t go that deep in this article.

We can however say that the amount of food we eat helps us to feel full and satisfied. And if we can get that full feeling by eating more while keeping our calories less, we run less risk of becoming overweight.

To recap then, we now know that there's no such thing as types of calories and that calories are a measure of energy in a food or burned by an activity.

And the game for the person wanting to lose weight is to eat fewer calories per day than they burn in doing their daily tasks.