Food Energy: why you must stop eating fatty foods to lose weight

October 5, 2009

Diets & Nutrition

If you want to lose weight you have to avoid eating fats and to drink alcohol. But do you know why? Actually the explanation is pretty simple. Fats and alcohol contain a lot of calories, much more than carbs and proteins do.

Have you ever asked yourself: how does food become energy for your body? We all know that food is our fuel. Well foods contain various nutritional substances, some of which provide you with the energy you need all day long. The other nutritional substances are used by your body to help him use properly all that energy.

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Proteins, carbohydrates, lipids and alcohol are the main source of energy. Daily your body needs a certain amount of energy for it to function. All the energy that you take form foods and all the energy that you use up during the day is measured in calories.

The biggest part, almost all of your daily caloric intake is made up by the proteins, lipids, carbs and alcohol that consume. Each of them give you a certain number of calories. Carbs and proteins give you 4 calories per gram, fats give you 9 claories per gram and alcohol 7 calories per gram.

As you can see fats give you more than twice the amount of calories than proteins and carbs do. Alcohol also gives you almost twice the amount of calories. If you have a diet rich in fatty foods washed with plenty of alcoholic beverages you will only get fatter and fatter. That is why most weight loss diets that work preach the elimination of fatty foods from your diet and stopping drinking any alcoholic beverages.

But you cannot eliminate fats form your menu altogether. You body needs them to function. A good weight loss diet will help you reach a healthy weight by combining in an healthy way carbs, proteins and fats with other nutritional substance, striking a balance between the caloric intake and caloric burnings.

Your current weight and your future weight is determined by the energetic balance between the intake and consumption of calories. If you want to lose weight you have to burn more calories daily than the amount you eat. If you eat more calories than you burn you will get fatter. If you want to maintain your weight you have to have an energetic balance by consuming exactly the amount of calories that you burn daily.

You don’t have to go nuts trying to strike the perfect caloric balance. What you should strive for is on the average to have a good caloric intake and caloric burning that will help you achieve your goals. Depending on what you desire, to lose weight or to keep your current weight, you have to adapt your diet and physical activity level.

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To get an idea of how big of a caloric deficit you have to create to lose weight you should know that 1 pound of fat contains 3500 calories. This means that you have to burn 3500 calories to lose 1 pound of fat. This is the simplistic view because there are lots of factors that come into play which might make it so that you need to burn more or less than 3500 calories to lose weight.

So theoretically if you create a 500 calories deficit daily, you will lose 1 pound in 7 days. You can achieve this easily just by stopping eating fatty junk food and drinking one bottle of soda daily. If you start exercising frequently you can lose a lot more weight faster.

to find out the impact of drinking alcohol on your diet you should read:
Drinking alcohol and dieting: how alcohol influences your diet
Alcohol and weight loss: does alcohol and dieting mix?

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