The importance of understanding your energybalance

The first step to loose weight or to add on weight is to understand your energy intake levels

Most foods contain energy. The main source of energy is from fat, carbohydrates, protein and not to forget that even alcohol contains energy. Your energy requirement differs from person to person but its based on a couple of different factors such as:

Gender
Age
Length
Weight
If you are physically active or not
Do you train or not

Our daily diet have a big impact on how to maintain our energy balance. The relation of our energy intake and energy consumption its a crucial factor on how to maintain our health.

To make it more manageable we need to understand the difference between the different energy sources.
Energy is often mentioned as kilojoule (KJ) or the newer one kilocalories (kcal). Sometimes you could even find the unit megajoule (MJ), where 1 MJ is 1000kj.

The relations between Kj and Kcal is:

1Kj = 0,24 Kcal
1 kcal = 4,2 Kj

Below is a chart that shows how much energy Carbohydrates, Proteins, Fat and Alcohol gives:

Carbohydrates 17 kJ/gram = 4 kcal/gram
 
Proteins 17 kJ/gram = 4 kcal/gram
 
Alcohol 29 kJ/gram = 7 kcal/gram

Fat 37 kJ/gram = 9 kcal/gram

As you can see you receive twice the amount of energy from fat than from proteins or carbohydrates.

I know there has been a lot of figures in this post which makes it more complicated to understand. In order of keeping track on how much energy you give your body and how much you consume you must know your numbers.

The next post we will talk about different factors that affect our energy consumption.
Thank you for reading and because of nutrition being a complicated subject please feel free to ask questions.