Calories in calories out

What is a calorie and what does it do? In technical terms a calorie is a unit of heat equal to the amount of heat required to raise the temperature of one killogram of water by one degree at one atmosphere pressure.

To us, it means weight. How much you weigh depends on how many calories you consume and burn. No matter what you learn, when it all comes down to it your weight equals calories in, calories out. So how many calories should we consume?

The amount of calories you need per day all depends on how tall you are, what age you are, your weight, and how active you are. On about.com I found a great calorie counter. go to the nutrition section and there will be a link that says "how many calories do I need" This will prompt you to answer a few questions about your self and then let you know your results. This web site told me how many calories I needed to eat to either maintain/gain/or loose weight, with or without excercise. (this website is a great guideline. But if you want an exact number tailored specifically to you you should go see a nutritionist that can give you a metabloic test)

To maintain my weight with no excercise I need to eat 1694 calories per day. I can tailor what I want to do from this number. We all know that 3500 calories = 1 lb. If I want to loose 1 lb per week then I divide 3500/7 = 500. I need to find some way to have a 500 calorie deficit. I can do this either by eating 500 calories less per day or burn 500 calories per day working out. You can combine these (which would be the recommended way) by eating 200 calories less and burning 300 calories through excercise. For example, if you are doing high endurance training and burning 1000 calories per day, but maintain your 1694 intake of calories. You will loose around 2 lbs per week.

However, if you are not trying to loose any weight, but you work out a lot this is where you can up your calorie intake. Lets say you run 5 miles and burn 550 calories, but you dont have any interest in lowering your body weight, that would give you the freedom to up your calorie intake to 2244. This is a very reasonable number for an active adult.

This is a basic explination of calories in calories out. There is a lot more I will talk about later in regards to calories.