Calories – Learning About Calories

One of the biggest hurdles to losing or maintaining weight is to understand what a calorie really is. It's not a little demon that wants to make you wider, it's just a unit of measurement but a calorie is measurement of energy. When you hear something has 70 calories, it's describing the worth of the energy your body will receive from eating those calories.

Calories aren't bad for you. If you didn't have calories, you'd have no energy for your body to burn for all its functions. If you eat more calories than you burn through activities, then you're going to get fat as a result.
Nearly all foods and drinks have a caloric value. Water has no calories, a cup of iceberg lettuce has just under 10 calories. Half a cup of peanuts will have 427 calories for example.

If you're watching the calories you eat and you want to know how much you're eating, use our free calorie counter and look up the foods you eat the most. You can get a good idea if you're eating more calories than you should be.
Want to learn how to quickly calculate the calories from fat grams in what you eat?
Here's a simple formula:
There are 9 calories in a gram of fat.

So for example if you were eating a serving of potato pancakes and they had 10 grams of fat. You would take the 10 grams of fat in the potato pancakes and 10 x 9 calories in a gram of fat which equals 90 calories from fat.