Calories and Weight Loss

Here's what you need to know about calories and weight loss if you want to effectively lose weight and keep it off.

A calorie is a unit of energy. Specifically, a calorie is the amount of energy it takes to raise the temperature of one kilogram of water one degree centigrade.

The word calorie is used interchangeably to describe the amount of energy in food and the amount of energy stored in the body as adipose tissue (body fat). For example, a Krispy Kreme glazed doughnut contains about 210 calories and a 25 minute jog on the treadmill burns off about 210 calories.

When it comes to calories and weight loss, if you burn more calories than you consume, your body will tap into stored fat for energy to make up for the calorie deficit and you'll lose weight. If you consume more calories than you burn, regardless of if the calories come from fats, carbohydrates or proteins, your body will store the surplus calories as fat and you'll gain weight. Some foods may get stored as fat more easily than others because of the way they affect your hormones or blood sugar, but too much of any food will get stored as fat.

Since you must create a calorie deficit if you want to lose body fat, what's the best way to create this deficit? Should you decrease your calories, increase your physical activity, or do a combination of both?

The most effective way to lose body fat is by decreasing your calories a little and increasing your physical activity a lot. But many people make the mistake of doing just the opposite - they drastically reduce their calories and do little or no exercise.

You'll lose weight initially on a very low calorie diet, but you'll often lose more water than body fat since very low calorie diets tend to be dehydrating.

A very low calorie diet will also cause your body to go into "starvation mode." Once your body is in starvation mode, your metabolism will slow down, you'll lose muscle as your body starts using muscle for energy, and it will become very difficult to lose body fat as your body tries to hold on to its fat stores.

The combination of hunger and fat loss becoming very difficult is what causes people to give up on very low calorie diets. And once the diet is over, most people go back to their old eating habits and end up gaining back any weight that they lost - only now they have less muscle and a slower metabolism.

Decreasing your calories a little and increasing your physical activity a lot enables you to lose body fat without being constantly hungry, without slowing down your metabolism, and without losing muscle.

The bottom line when it comes to calories and weight loss is that you have to cut back on calories in order to lose body fat, but you should never drastically reduce calories. Decreasing calories a little and increasing physical activity a lot is the proven way to permanently lose body fat.