A calorie is a unit of energy that represents the amount of heat needed to raise a quantity of water by one degree of temperature.
Every day a person’s body consumes an amount of calories based on the person’s height, weight and metabolism. The body needs these calories in order to survive on the long term and we acquire and store them through eating.
Every food we eat comes with an amount of calories and also with some other nutritional values such as proteins, carbohydrates and fat. Whenever there is a surplus of calories, the body stores them for later usage (we gain weight) and when we consume less calories than our body burns, we start losing weight.
That’s one of the reason why everybody recommends consuming around 2000 calories per day, as this is an average of how many calories a healthy body consumes in a day. However this number will be different for each individual, as some bodies contain more water, and therefore will consume more calories.
The general rule is that the bigger you are the more calories your body will consume. That’s why losing weight it’s easier in the beginning for overweight people, but the more they lose the more difficult it gets.
Exercising it’s also a part of the equation as each time we exercise we burn additional calories, on top of the ones that our body burns daily. Doing this helps not only losing weight but also gaining muscles in different parts of the body. A good category of exercises to increase the amount of calories burned in a day are cardio exercises. Running or cycling are recommended in order to keep a healthy lifestyle.
In conclusion there is a direct link between calories and the weight of an individual as they depend on each other. All this information can be helpful in order to achieve different weight goals, either by limiting the in-take of calories (eating healthier), by raising the amount of calories burned daily (exercising) or a combination of the two.
