We keep hearing the term- calories all the time. Calories, when we talk about fitness and fatloss.
Low calorie, high calorie, good calorie, bad calorie…we hear it all the time. But do we really know what is a calorie?
Not getting into too much Physics, Calorie is simply a unit of measure for ENERGY just like Meter is to distance.
How does it matter to us?
It’s just that we need energy to do everything we do. Energy to stay alive, to breath, to think, to sit, to stand, to walk and everything else we do.
And basically get the energy we need by munching on Glucon-D…err just kidding! We get energy through any food that we eat.
How much energy do we need?
Short answer- as much energy as we spend. To understand better, we need to define these two terms
Basal-Metabolic- Rate (BMR) and Total-Daily-Energy-Expenditure (TDEE)
BMR is the minimum amount of energy we need to stay alive for a day without doing anything and just lie in a place without moving.
Who the hell really lies in one place whole day long without moving? Even the laziest person in the world in incapable of doing that!!
At the least we get up, walk around, eat and sit and relax. That is why we need TDEE to really understand how much energy we need.
TDEE, as the name suggests, is the total amount of energy we spend throughout a day. It includes our BMR + energy spent on all our activities.
It is very obvious that the TDEE of a very active person is quite high compared to a more sedentary person.It also means the active person can eat more food without getting fat. And a sedentary person is bound to gain fat if he keeps eating more.
Regular exercise also significantly increases our TDEE so we can enjoy eating more apart from benefits of better health and fitness.
You can easily calculate your BMR and TDEE if you know your Body-Fat-Percentage.
Click on the links to read a little more and calculate your Basal-Metabolic-Rate and Total-Daily-Energy-Expenditure