Calories

Calories are a measurement of heat.

The definition of calorie that you might find in a science book is that a calorie is the amount of heat required to raise one gram of water one degree centigrade.

There are more technical details to it actually. For example, it depends on the air pressure and the temperature you start at.

But if you were to put one gram of water in a pan and heat it up and raise the temperature one degree centigrade, that would take one calorie. And when people abbreviate calorie they use a "c".

Now that isn't much water and that isn't much heat. So to make it easier to work with there is another measurement, and that is kilocalorie. A kilocalorie is 1,000 of those little calories. And when people abbreviate kilocalorie they use a capital "C".

See, when you write c. that means little calorie. And when you write C. that means big calories.

Food calories are big calories

Now, your food is in kilocalories. So that means, for example, that 100 Calories is 100 C., the big calories.

This tells you that there is a lot of energy in food. If you had one calorie of food (a very tiny amount) and you used the energy to heat up some water, you could raise the temperature of 1000 grams of water one degree. That is a liter of water (about a quart.)

So 100 calories (the amount of calories in a small apple) could raise the temperature of a liter of water 100 degrees centigrade. And since there are 100 degrees centigrade between freezing and boiling, that means you could take a liter of ice and put it in a pan and heat it until it boiled with the energy in an apple. That is a lot of energy.

So what does this have to do with weight loss?

It means just this: there is a lot of energy in the food you eat. A whole lot of energy. And if you don't burn it off somehow you will store it as fat. There is a lot of energy there to store.

That is why you don't feel like you eat that much but you are still overweight. You store all that extra energy as fat.

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