Popular Myth: Weight Loss Is Influenced by Calorie Types

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

There are articles out there going on about “what kind of calories to eat to lose weight” or “why you should be aware of calorie types.” I saw one that goes into the “fact” that there are 3 types of calories - protein, fat and carbohydrates!

Frankly, in reading this stuff, I’m not sure whether to shed tears of laughter or of pity.

To give you some perspective here, we use inches to measure length, pounds to measure weight and calories to measure energy.

Pounds don’t come in “flavors”, inches don’t come in “colors” and calories don’t come in “types.” To talk like this just wouldn’t make any sense (except perhaps in poetry).

We can however, talk about things like the amount of energy in food. We can also talk about the amount of energy you burn when you perform some task, such as walking, raking leaves of shoveling snow.

In either case, we would talk about these energy amounts in terms of calories.

So different foods can have their calories packed in “tighter.” It takes just a handful of coal to equal the same weight as a big bag of feathers. It is a similar kind of thing when you compare a small piece of cheesecake to a pile of celery.

The different caloric facts about food and activity are at the heart of some diet programs. They can also make a big difference in our “life after diet.” This is because these caloric facts play a big role in whether or not we feel ’satisfied’ after we eat. This is actually a topic too complicated to cover in this article.

But I can say that the relationship between volume of food and number of calories is very important when it comes to weight control. If we can find foods that supply large quantities but small numbers of calories, we stand a better chance of feeling satisfied while not gaining (and maybe even losing) weight.

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.

Also, if weight loss is our goal, then what we ultimately want to do is burn more calories during the day with our activities than we take in when we eat.