Coach Bee: What are Calories?

Coach Bee is a Health and Fitness Consultant from Singapore residing in Bangkok, Thailand and the favored Personal Trainer/Lifestyle Consultant of many high profile locals. Coach Bee’s specialties include Fitness, Yoga, Strength and Nutrition, Coach Bee creates bespoke agendas for clients (Corporate/Individual) aimed at creating a better mind, body and soul.

Here are Coach Bee's thoughts on calories

No one really ask what calories are. People usually ask how to lose weight. How to lose fat. How to gain muscles. And guess what is the next thing you hear? Calorie deficit, Calorie deficit, Calorie deficit. If your trainer does not tell you that first-hand but gives you a bunch of fad diets. You better run in the opposite direction. I’m not going to name different fad diets here because this post isn’t about diet shamming. It’s about understanding what calories are.

We hear it all the time, caloric surplus, calories deficit, caloric maintenance. How many calories should I eat? What are the exercises I can do to burn the most calories? The list goes on and on. So let’s it break down.

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What are calories?

Calories is a unit, calories is energy. You can even replace the word calories with unicorns and it would still mean the same thing. Calories is just a unit and a basic way for us everyday people to understand how to calculate the way we eat and measure the amount of food we consume. It is as simple as that. Calories in, calories out. The body doesn’t understand that an apple and ½ cup of ice-cream amount to same number of calories. The body only understand how to break down the different food into nutrients and use it to fuel the body in the form of energy.

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So when you hear people say, I ate snickers every day and I still lost weight and it is possible. It is because they are definitely in a caloric deficit and they have purposefully slide a bar of snickers into their meal plan so they will not go above their daily caloric intake. With that said, you may lose the weight but not the fat. Not to mention, the persons’ energy might not be greatest, digestion might be affected, bloating might occur. The insulin levels may be spiked unnecessary daily. You will feel like shit. However, enjoying a snicker bar every once in a while has no harm either.

But what I like to do on the daily is to encourage you to choose a healthier version of what you are craving because we all still have goals to achieve no matter what we are going through in life right?

How to count calories?

Calculating basal metabolic rate and total energy expenditure.

To find out how many calories you burn a day, you need to know your total daily energy expenditure, or TDEE. It starts with finding your basal metabolic rate (BMR), which you can get measured with a machine like the InBody Test, which sends electrodes through your body and calculates your BMI, body fat percentage, and basal metabolic rate, among other stats.

You can also do a math equation to find your BMR using the Harris-Benedict formula based on your total body weight, height, age, and sex. It’s a little more complicated, but the internet is your best friend and all you got to do is enter those numbers and it will churn it out for you.

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