It is also important for the amount, the calories, that can be added to the daily diet, whether you want to build muscle or reduce weight. As a rule of thumb, the more exercise you have per day, the higher your calorie needs.

Basic and performance turnover

The basal metabolic rate is the amount of calories that the body consumes at rest. Physical exercise is not included in the calculation, because even when you sleep, you consume calories.
The performance turnover, however, specifies the amount of calories needed for physical activities. Do you do sports or cycle to shop? Then your performance turnover increases significantly compared to someone who climbs the stairs in the office building.

Basic and performance turnover together make up the total turnover.

This in turn represents the amount of calories you need every day. But if you want to lose weight now, you have to reduce your overall turnover. It is important that the deficit inflicted on the body remains within the tolerable framework, because otherwise it will simply reduce its turnover. The human body switches to a kind of hunger mode and uses only the most necessary energy to maintain the body's functions. He learns to cope with less and still doesn't give a gram of fat. 

You should therefore generally not consume fewer calories than you burn in your basal metabolism. Assume that you should lose at most between 300 and 500 kcal less to lose weight, with 500 kcal corresponding to a bar of chocolate. If the calorie deficit is too great, your body will try to compensate for it and react with food cravings.

That's how many calories you need a day

Everyone is different and so it is also different who should take how many calories a day. Women can assume that they can get by with around 1800 to 2000 Kcal a day if they move up to half an hour a day. If their physical activity increases up to an hour, they need about 200 Kcal more. With more than an hour of exercise a day, the amount of calories needed is between 2400 and 2800 Kcal. 

An important point at this point: The calorie consumption increases not only through exercise. 

Emotional stress also increases calorie consumption. If the stress persists, the turnover is reduced again because the body? figuratively speaking? prepared for bad times. He keeps as much energy as possible because of seemingly tiring times. Since the food intake is often also restricted at the time of great emotional stress, it may be that the body already goes into hunger metabolism.

Men need a little more energy a day.

They can be assumed that the calorie requirement for less than half an hour of exercise a day is between 2100 and 2500 Kcal. If a man moves longer and is active for one hour, he needs around 2500 to 2700 Kcal a day. With even more exercise (more than an hour a day), the calorie requirement increases to around 3000 to 3500 Kcal.

Through regular fitness training in the gym, with an affordable one Fitness subscription, the calorie requirement is increased again. The training itself increases the energy requirement up to 500 Kcal, so if you continue to eat normally, you will automatically supply your body with less energy than it needs. 

In addition, there is a small phenomenon in active athletes: their muscle mass increases and muscles consume more energy. The basal metabolic rate increases in well-trained people compared to non-athletes, whereby the exact additional metabolism cannot be quantified exactly. But it is therefore understandable that an athlete has one or the other? Sweet sin? can allow and yet does not increase. 

His increased basal metabolism compensates for a small snack more than is the case with an untrained person. Nevertheless, such nutritional slip-ups should not become permanent.

Calories are not all calories

If you want to lose weight, you can use a calculator and calculate the amount of calories you eat every day. But even if the value determined in this way is sometimes alarmingly low, these people do not lose weight! Experts say that it is not the amount, but rather the calorie itself, because one calorie is not the same as another. 100 calories from a healthy food is worth much more than 100 calories from processed foods.

The calorific value is not decisive

A calorie is a scientific unit of measurement and indicates the amount of heat that is required to heat a gram of water by one degree Celsius. This explanation is of course completely irrelevant for nutrition and fitness, because hardly anyone can do anything with it. Nutritionists say the calorie as a unit of measurement that it has long lost its value and is no longer meaningful. 

Because even if two foods bring the same amount of calories, it may be that the body uses them differently. In addition, the body of person A uses the calories differently than that of person B, which is why both have a different figure. If you then add the time of day (calories are used differently during the day), the poor fitness friend who just wanted to lose a little is completely overwhelmed.

Quite simply: The calorific value, i.e. the calorie count, is not decisive.

Rather, it has to be considered how each individual's body utilizes the energy that it receives. And this is exactly where the problem with sugar can be seen. Because you can save calories, but if you consume a lot of sugar, you will not lose weight. 

Hence the recommendation: Regardless of the amount of calories, you should pay attention to the sugar content of the respective food!

Prof. Koletzko once told the Deutsches Ärzteblatt that sugar has a different effect on fat synthesis than starch. For this reason alone, calories are not always the same. There was also a study of children from the United States who usually consumed a lot of sugar. They consumed food other than their usual diet for over nine days, replacing the sugar with starch. Within the nine days there was a significant decrease in the fat content in the liver and a reduction in the belly fat.

The use of fructose should also be used with caution, because if a lot of fructose suddenly gets into the liver, it is overwhelmed with the conversion. It then simply stores the fructose as fat, which in turn accumulates in the liver or is released into the blood. This means that other tissues also get this fat from sugar.

No more counting calories!

According to the latest findings, there is no point in constantly counting calories. It is much more important to choose the right foods and this can also be the ones that have a comparatively large number of calories. Nuts, mushrooms and vegetables are examples of this and yet it is precisely these foods that make you slim. It is interesting in the context that people who eat Mediterranean are often slimmer than others who pay attention to fat and calories. 

On the other hand, they have high-fat foods on their menu, which contain oils, nuts and other fats. Still, people stay leaner. Again, it shows that calories are not just calories. Refined foods increase the release of certain hormones that interfere with and slow down the fat metabolism. 

They also ensure that we get hungry again faster and feel full for less.

Conclusion: That's why calorie counting is not important

Certainly, the amount of calories in food gives an indication of how much energy the body is consuming when eating the food. But 100 calories from salmon are significantly healthier than 100 calories from fructose, because this affects the metabolism differently. 

Against this background, the bad reputation that some foods have seems much less bad. Confessed nut eaters are proven to be leaner than people who use foods other than snacks instead of nuts, even if these foods have fewer calories than nuts. In order to stay slim and fit permanently, physical exercise still plays an important role.

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