Everyone is still talking about these calories – how much chocolate has, how much roll, and how many dumplings. In fact, however, a large number of people still do not know why to count these calories and how to do it so that it is good. Because how many calories should we eat if we weigh X kilograms and want to gain weight? Or lose weight? What to do to avoid the yo-yo effect later? Is the 1000 calorie diet really that good? There are plenty of questions.
Calories or kilocalories?
In physics, one calorie (written with a lowercase letter, expressed as the symbol of cal) is the amount of heat needed to heat one gram of chemically pure water, under one atmosphere pressure of one degree. Because it does not matter at what temperature we start heating and at what pressure, there are several definitions of calories, but they are similar and leave them to science historians.
You can see immediately that one calorie is extremely low heat. Well, because how do you have one gram of water, or literally, a droplet, to a pork chop or a bowl of stew? So as not to get lost in huge numbers, the energy value of foods is expressed in kilocalories. “Kilo” in Greek means a thousand or kilocalories is a thousand calories (like a kilometer is a thousand meters, a kilogram is a thousand grams, etc.). We write kilocalories with the symbol kcal. And such a symbol can be found in the tables on food products.
1 kcal = 1000 cal
Sometimes the word Calorie is capitalized instead of kilocalories, but this notation is not common, and to avoid misunderstandings it is better to write kcal and speak kilocalories.
Caloric demand is actually the daily energy requirement of our body – that is, how much energy in the form of food we need to provide our body to function well and at the same time maintain weight.
If you want to know how much your body burns calories to support vital functions, use the following formulas for basic metabolism:
Pattern for women:
PPM [kcal] = 665.09 + (9.56 x weight in kg) + (1.85 x height in cm) – (4.67 x age)
Formula for men:
PPM [kcal] = 66.47 + (13.75 x weight in kg) + (5 x height in cm) – (6.75 x age)
Total Metabolic Rate (CPM) – is actually the basic metabolism and the amount of energy that you need in your lifestyle for proper functioning.
How to calculate CPM?
CPM is PPM x physical activity factor.
Physical activity coefficients:
- 2.2-2.4 – people training professionally (heavy, everyday, long trainings)
- 2.0 – people with high physical activity (daily average and very intense exercises after about 60 minutes, hard physical work)
- 1.7 – 1.9 – people with moderate physical activity (exercises 3-5 times a week with low or medium intensity after max. 60 minutes)
- 1.4-1.5 – people with low physical activity (office work, light exercises once in a while)
This means that his daily energy requirement is about 3200 calories – that is what he should provide with food to maintain his current body weight.
