Do Calories Really Matter?

The Truth about Calories and Do They Really Matter

Calories were always seen as the most important part of any weight loss plan.  Simply reduce your calorie intake and, according to conventional wisdom, you would lose weight.  But new research has challenged the traditional view of calorie intake on weight management.  Which group of researchers are right?  Do calories really matter if we are trying to lose weight?

Calories and Losing Weight

Today I would like to talk about something that has become a bit of a controversy in recent years which is: Do calories really matter when trying to lose weight? Conventional wisdom says absolutely. It’s all about calories in versus calories out. But a whole new line of research suggests something different. It may be the types of foods we are eating creates changes in our body chemistry that actually allows us to gain weight and store more fat. So which is it? Do they really matter? Well, yes and no. Yes, they matter in the sense that the energy we eat while consuming calories has to go somewhere. We either store it as fat or lean mass or we burn it off as excessive energy. So if we are constantly eating too much, regardless of the type of food, eventually we are probably going to store it as fat.

Food Selection Matters

Now if you are a bodybuilder and you have a very specific diet in which you have a lot of protein and you are working out three or four hours a day, you probably will store that as muscle, which is great. But for most of us, that’s not really feasible, and what happens is we just eat too much on a regular basis, and it becomes fat. Now the type of food we have, however, is terribly important because we want food that drives us to lean muscle and not stored as fat. So the foods we choose need to be more whole foods, lower in calories, higher in nutrition, lean proteins, healthy fats and things of that nature. And avoid a lot of processed foods. So calories matter, but not in the way we think. And trying to count your calories every day is just not really feasible for most people. We don’t know what our bodies are doing or how much we’re burning off. It changes based on a million factors. So choosing the right foods and trying to let the foods, themselves, count the calories because they’re simple, they’re whole, and nutritious is a much more sustainable way to actually count our calories. So calories matter, but it’s more important in the foods we choose.

If you’re more interested in something along this line and trying to figure out this complex web of dieting and nutrition, we are having a Facebook Live event, we’re going to go over a lot of these types of topics. So we would be glad to see everyone there. Tag the link below, join us on June 12th, and we would love to see you. Thanks.