Calories are the energy in food. Your body has a constant demand for energy and uses the calories from food to keep functioning. Energy from calories fuels your every action, from fidgeting to marathon running.
Carbohydrates, fats and proteins are the types of nutrients that contain calories and are the main energy sources for your body. Regardless of where they come from, the calories you eat are either converted to physical energy or stored within your body as fat.
These stored calories will remain in your body as fat unless you use them up, either by reducing calorie intake so that your body must draw on reserves for energy, or by increasing physical activity so that you burn more calories.
Whether we eat animals or vegetables, food provides us with carbon-based energy that allows us to live, work, and play. Our bodies merely need to direct the right amounts of food energy to storage and the right amount to releasing the essential energy, second by second and minute by minute. An average person uses around 2400 calories of energy per day. Even if you are reading this lying in bed completely relaxed, your body is using energy just to stay alive. Your heart constantly works, pumping blood around the body. Every cell in your body is continuously busy, pumping out substances it doesn’t need and pumping in others.
The liver is particular is busy – manufacturing whatever sort of fuel the body requires at this moment in time. It can make glucose from substances released from elsewhere in the body. If there is too much glucose around, the liver can turn it into fat. The liver never rests.
Want to lose weight? What’s best? Exercising or some form of physical activities?
The duration of physical activity rather than the intensity has more effect in determining how much energy is used, calories burnt, and subsequently weight loss. If two persons, Omondi and Munge both weighing 100 kgs wanted to lose weight, Omondi hits the gym for a 45 min to one-hour exercise on Saturday mornings. On the other hand, Munge sets his sight on walking over long distances – about 50 kilometers on Saturday. Who do you think burns more energy each Saturday morning?
The answer lies in the time that the body is burning more than the resting level. For the half-hour on the gym, Omondi increases his energy usage from 1.3 calories each minute to an average of eight calories each minute. In half an hour he burns 240 calories. But then he sits down to recover and takes his phone to scroll through social media or read articles on his tablet for the rest of the morning, feeling good. In the next three and a half hours, staying seated, he burns 315 calories. Each Saturday morning a total of 555 calories are burned. Munge meanwhile walks to Muranga. He is active for eight hours – seven hours longer than Omondi – and expends more energy without breaking a sweat. Staying on his feet, carrying his 100kg around, he uses an average of 2.5 calories per minute – 1200 calories in all, which is 700 more than Omondi.
Managing Weight.
If your aim is to prevent weight gain, being moderately active for hours is more effective than a quick burst in the gym. You don’t have to take sweaty exercise – although, if you aim to maximize heart function and fitness, then bursts of additional brisk exercise are essential. Preventing weight gain is arguably one of the most important issues facing our society today, and one that could certainly be helped by, for example, changing transport policy to encourage people to be more active and walk or cycle more, along with legislation on food policy. But preventing weight gain is not the same thing as losing weight; getting rid of excess fat that has accumulated over a long time requires a different approach, which I will explain in my next update.
Suffice to say that the balance between energy burned during exercise – whatever form of activity you engage in – and energy pouring in from food is unequal. And for people who want to lose weight, the overwhelming priority must be to cut down on the consumption of food and calorie-containing drinks.
Post Summary;
-The body spends most energy each day just on keeping itself alive
-Humans get energy from only two basic types of fuel within the body – glucose, and fat
-Glucose is stored as glycogen in the liver and muscle – but in small amounts
-Fat does not cause any metabolic problem when stored under the skin, but it can cause serious problems when it builds up in the main organs, especially the liver and pancreas
-Short periods of exercise burn relatively few calories and make little difference to the balance between calories eaten and calories used
-Long-duration physical activity – gardening, doing housework, walking around – can make an excellent contribution to long-term energy balance
4 Responses
Good infor.
Great, how do I avoid loosing weight , my sugars are controlled recent hb1c was 6
So informative
Very educative .