Local Isagenix Consultant

Have you noticed it? There is a bunch of information on the Internet about “calorie types.”

I’ve seen an article that actually classifies the calorie types. This person would have us believe that there are fat calories, carbohydrate calories and protein calories. Another warns you of the woes that may befall you if you don’t know your “calorie types.”

We are talking about people who are doing serious time in la-la land here.

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

Since a calorie is a measurement of energy, it makes about as much sense to talk about carbohydrate calories vs. fat calories as it does to talk about red inches vs. green inches. An inch is an inch and a calorie is a calorie.

While we can”t talk about types of calories, we can talk about “how many calories.” Each type of food contains a different amount of energy. And you burn different amounts of energy when you do different activities.

When we talk about the energy in food or the energy used up by an activity, we use the word calories to indicate how much energy we are talking about.

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.

This fact lays the foundation for some diets and it is also the basis for long term weight control. The feeling we have when we feel “satisfied” after eating is actually quite complex - too complex for us to go into here.

But we can note that one of the factors that go into feeling “satisfied” is the volume of food we have eaten. Clearly if we can eat more food while taking in fewer calories, we are more likely to feel satisfied while at the same time, be less likely to gain weight.

The notion that there are “types” of calories needs to be replaced with the idea that different foods contain different amounts of energy.

And we now know that to lose fat, we need to burn more calories than we eat.