Lose Weight Program > The Three Kinds of Calories

Nobody has ever seen a calorie. But calories are agonizingly visible when they settle down on you in the wrong places.



It may seem strange that a thing that has no physical existence can make you fat. A square inch has no flavor and neither has a calorie. You can't touch a calorie any more than you can put your finger on a heat wave. It is as invisible as a fever. A calorie, in short, is merely a measuring unit of energy in terms of heat. It is a thermal yardstick applied to the exchanges of energy in your body and to the foods that provide such energy.

In a furnace, coal gives off heat, which could be measured in calories but is usually calculated according to a different yardstick called British Thermal Units. In you, food gives off heat measured in calories, one calorie being the amount of heat required to raise the temperature of a pint of water 4 degrees Fahrenheit. Now you may promptly forget that definition. Nowhere in this book will you be requested to learn a lot of technical shop talk.' Weight-control arithmetic is so simple that it is understood as easily as Mother Goose.

Coal, if mixed with slate, does not give off very much heat. Some foods contain much water, inert fiber, and other unburnable elements so that they do not yield much heat either. You cannot judge, from the mere physical bulk of a meal, how much energy value it contains.

It is possible to eat small-size meals and grow ingloriously fat on them. It is also possible to eat meals of huge bulk and grow thin as a rail. The differences are matters of calories.

If you aren't interested in what happens to food inside your body (it's really exciting, though!) just find your ideal weight from the table in How Much Should I Weigh? and then go to work on the diet beginning here. You can reduce without benefit of arithmetic.

All calories are alike, but there are three different kinds. That sounds like a paradox. Let's be scientific, then, and explain that although any calorie represents the same amount of heat, it can be furnished by three very different types of food elements: carbohydrates, proteins, and fats. And oh, the difference to you! Alcohol furnishes a fourth kind of calories, but they have already been described and they don't figure in a scientific diet anyhow.

The modern way to weight control lays great stress on these differences. One kind of calorie (strictly speaking, one classification of food that furnishes the calorie) is capable of laying on fat with great rapidity. But happily, another kind of calorie is outstandingly efficient in assisting the body to retain, or obtain, those svelte lines we healthily yearn for.

"Carbohydrates" is a fifty-cent word that sounds a lot less formidable when you think of these food elements as being sugar and starch, which they are. Fruits, vegetables, cereals, and sweets contain them in relative abundance.

They are the quickest food fuels for muscular energy. When carbohydrate is digested, a simple form of sugar is poured into the blood. If you think that sugar in the blood (or even a, little in the urine) is bad business and invariably means you are coming down with diabetes, be advised that you can't get along without it. It is indispensable for muscular exertion, as marathon athletes who munch chocolate bars for quick energy have long since learned.

But your blood can hold only a limited amount of sugar. A considerable proportion of the surplus is tucked away, mostly in the liver but also in the muscles, in the form of glycogen - a starchlike substance that can be drawn upon quickly for energy.

When the liver storehouse is fully loaded, surplus carbohydrate is simply laid down - the truth may as well be known - as fat.


Continue to Carbohydrates and Fats

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