Many diets encourage users to count the amount of calories they intake on a daily or weekly basis.

However, a lot of people are confused about what exactly a calorie is. So I’ve decided to write this article to explain what calories are and how they effect your diet.

A calorie is not like a carb or a vitamin or any other physical element. In fact, it is not a physical element at all, it is simply an energy measurement.  If a meal has a lot of calories that simply means it is high in energy. One calorie is equivalent to the amount of energy it takes to raise one kilogram of water by one degree Celsius. Everything that you do requires the burning of calories to fuel your actions. Everything from a wiggle of your toes to a sniff of your nose requires energy to be expended. When you don’t burn as many calories as you are consuming in your meals, then the excess calories are stored into fat cells.

Calories play a crucial role in balancing your diet and exercise regimens. If you are able to calculate how many calories you’re taking in, then you will know how many you need to burn to keep fat from being stored, and more importantly to burn existing fat. That is why it is so important to your diet.

Once you have a good knowledge of calories, you can shop for the right foods and make adjustments to your exercises as needed. You can gage how much endurance you may have on any given day based on the calories you have consumed within the past day or so. If you only ate yogurt and a sandwich at 8AM, and you try to exercise hard at 3PM with no other food in your stomach, you can bet you will be exhausted very easily. You really don’t need to know about calories to know that, the concept is the same though, calories are just a way to accurately depict what you should be doing in your diet and exercise by measuring your energy intake.

Calories are just one of the factors to consider when practicing a good diet and exercise regimen.