Why Counting Calories Does Not Equal a Healthy Diet
Watching your calories is the key to a healthy diet, right?
Not so much.
Creating a calorie deficit to lose weight and eating a healthy diet are two completely different things.
A calorie is a unit of energy, and is the amount of energy required to raise the temperature of one kilogram of water by one degree Celsius. In terms of your body, when you do work, like exercise, you ‘burn’ calories. If you took science in high school, you know that energy is not created or destroyed, it is just transferred. Its pretty boring scientific, but basically when you consume food, you consume energy/calories. By doing work, you transfer those food calories into energy to move your body. Those calories then turn into heat which is released from the body.
Food is fuel.
Now we all know that some foods contain more calories than others, but how many calories something has tells us nothing about the food itself. A calorie is an increment of measurement, how much energy is in the food, yet most people use calories as a judgment on what is a ‘good’ food and what is a ‘bad’ food. This stems from people wanting to be able to eat as much as possible, and put forth very little work. Therefore, people tend to gravitate towards lower calorie foods, and mistake them for good or healthy foods. Eating three 100-calorie packs of cookies isn’t healthy. Nutrients are healthy.
A 50 calorie apple is not equal to a 50 calorie cookie.
Calories are an important part of the health equation. First thing is first, you can’t over eat- too many calories, no matter what their source is unhealthy. But eating a 500 calorie slice of cake and a 500 calorie well balanced meal is not the same. An apple will build your health: it provides nutrients, vitamins, minerals, fiber, and water to sustain and nourish your body, helping it, and your metabolism, run efficiently. That cookie? It’s going to break you down, offering nothing to your health: Just empty calories that pack on the pounds and drain your energy.
Once your calories are under control, you need to focus on eating a clean, healthy diet, or you will always be wrestling to get your body under control. And guess what? Your body always wins.
