Calories & Weight Loss
Introduction

Why People Gain Weight

Excess Calories (meaning food energy) are what put on weight.

But dietary fat, carbohydrate, protein, and other nutrients strongly affect this process in ways that can make weight loss either easy or nearly impossible.

In this section we discuss:

Why simply limiting excess calories will not -- by itself -- make you lose the weight.

How many Calories you really need. (You actually can know this with a lot of precision.)

How many Calories can you reasonably cut out in order to use up stored fat?  There are several practical limits and even a few theoretical limits.

How long will it take?

What problems will you run into as you do this?

Main Discussion:
Calories do count!

Calories measure a vital nutrient -- food energy -- which your body must have in order to survive.

But excess Calories make you fat. In other words, too much of a good thing ... is not a good thing.

Actually, Calories are so vital to your survival that your body is genetically "hard-wired" to "play it safe" by storing every Calorie it doesn't need to use right away -- "just in case it might need them during the next famine...". And your body has a nearly unlimited capacity to store excess Calories. (In contrast, every other human nutrient has a very limited storage capacity.)

Nor can your body waste any of this vital nutrient -- either before or after it's been stored -- because it has no way to "flush out" Calories without burning them or to burn them without first needing the energy to keep you alive & move you around.

That's the bad news. But this bad news becomes irrelevant when you understand it and know how to work around it.

The good news is that your body pulls excess Calories out of it's fat stores just as easily as it puts them in.

Many people (including professionals), assume -- wrongly -- that your body can easily store Calories but can't easily get them back out of storage when it needs them (like when you're on a diet). This is wrong. God & evolution don't work that way.

In fact, fat cells routinely release fat into your blood every minute of every day because your muscles and muscular organs like the heart routinely use mostly fat for energy.

In other words, fat does not somehow "get stuck" in your fat cells.

Then why are diets so hard?

Dieting becomes difficult only when it causes sensations like hunger, cravings, aches, pains, and low energy levels.

But these sensations have nothing to do with how many Calories you eat or how fat you are. They are caused entirely by other food factors.

In other words, Calories do not control hunger. And that's good, because it means it's possible to eat very few Calories, and therefore use up stored fat for energy, but still not feel hunger, simply by also properly managing the other food factors that actually do control hunger.

So Calories do count and must be controlled. But limiting Calories does not make diets difficult. Then what does make them difficult?

Diet difficulty is caused by the other nutrients in food, and to eliminate it while you are losing weight, they must also be controlled.

Calories are just one of the roughly 50 nutrients your body needs to get from food and in the right amounts in order to be healthy. Whenever your body starts to run low on even one of these nutrients it will trigger a vague "food focus" that will quickly grow into the very unpleasant sensations of hunger, cravings, aches, pains, and low energy levels.

In other words, it wants you to eat food to get it more of whatever nutrient it needs. You've almost certainly experienced this many times.

But go look in a mirror. Does it look like you're running low on stored Calories?

If not, then these unpleasant sensations must be caused by your body getting low on one of the other nutrients it needs from food.

So in addition to limiting calories, you must make sure you also get enough of all of the other nutrients your body needs.

The very best news we can give you is that these other factors are also simple to control -- once you've learned how and practiced the technique a little.

In other sections of this website we discuss these other factors and how to control them properly.

In the rest of this section we talk about Calories and their effect on body weight. How many Calories do you need? How many can you reasonably cut out in order to use up storage fat? How long will it take? What are the problems you're likely to encounter as you do this?

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