Way back in the early 00’s, the calcount team set out to make an online resource for Australia’s calorie counters. This the result!
What is calcount?
Calorie counting is way of knowing, tracking and measuring the amount of calories (energy) you consume. If you want to lose weight you must work out how many calories you currently eat and how many you need to eat in order to burn fat. The tools and resources on this site include everything you need to do just that.
You will lose weight due to calorie restriction if you limit your food energy intake to below an identifiable level.
Calorie counting is fairly simple. The most important part of calorie counting is the accurate measurement of calories whilst making sure that food eaten is recorded and tracked.
Calorie is King
No doubt, you have heard that in order to lose weight you need to exercise more and eat fewer carbs, but never forget that only CALORIES are KING! Whether the calories come from fat, carbohydrates, protein, or alcohol is ultimately irrelevant.
Some diets are better than others, but ultimately weight gain or loss is ruled by King Calorie alone. Calorie counting is the only way for a person to seriously control their weight.
Exercise and Sports help, but…
Of course, it is important to lead an active life, preferably by trying to follow a consistent exercise routine. Regular walking, running, swimming and other physical activities will certainly boost general health and help with weight loss. Does this mean that fitness training in the gym for hours on end is the best way to slim down?
(Un)fortunately, people overestimate the weight loss effect of sports.
When it comes right down to it, day-to-day diet is what determines weight loss or gain, in every person.
calcount is dedicated to understanding, measuring, and explaining King Calorie.
Calories in Food
“Calories” is the word we use when we speak about the amount of energy in what we eat.
Foods you eat are broken down to release the energy contained into your body. The calories are released so that you can live!
However, if you eat more than needed, some of the extra calories are not burned. Instead, your body uses them to make itself bigger by building fat/adipose tissue (and/or muscle if you perform heavy exercise).
Fat makes Excess Weight
If your body made itself bigger by growing everything bigger and taller and stronger and keeping its size in proportion to its healthy capabilities, perhaps that might not be such a bad thing. Unfortunately, it does not get bigger in proportion. It gets bigger by packing fat onto places that cannot properly support it.
Even kids, with their growing bones and muscles, will store excess energy as adipose tissue.
More and more fat is made over time. There is no reason, from a biological perspective, to stop growing.
Bigger and Bigger
For as long as the extra is available, it will keep packing the fatty kilos. Even when your heart, veins, lungs, spleen, kidneys and other non-growing organs strain and buckle, it will not stop.
When you are bigger, you need to eat more to stay the same size.
Problem, and Solution
If you want to reverse the process, then you must go straight to the root cause of the problem.
Eating too many calories causes fat to be made and eating too few causes it to be destroyed.
If you eat less than you need, your body will make itself smaller. It does this by breaking fat and some muscle to release the needed energy.
When you are smaller, fewer calories are required to stay the same size.
How Energy and Activities affect Weight
Here’s an illustrated explanation:
Measuring the Energy in Meals
A calorie is the unit commonly used when measuring the energy in foods made for human consumption. A “calorie” is not actually a real thing, in the same way that metres or degrees Celsius or kilometres-per-hour are not real things. However, the energy a calorie represents is a real thing, in the same way that distance(m), temperature(°C) and speed(km/h) are real things.
The energy in food is the same thing as the energy in electricity, petrol, nuclear bombs and the sun. Although one thing, energy is measured using different names and amounts just depending on what people are used to. You can convert a calorie of energy into any of the other names used for energy, like “joule”, “kilojoule”, “electron-volt”, “kilowatt-hour” and “Hartree”.
calcount has an App to crunch the Numbers
The universally accepted way to measure the energy in foods is to burn it and measure how much heat it makes. Then, grade the amount of heat produced on an energy scale using units like “calorie” or “kilojoule”. The amount of energy therein comprises its calories count. It is that simple.
Larger amounts of the same substance make more heat than smaller amounts. For example, half a cup of chopped potato contains less energy than a full potato does. Critically, some foods make more heat than others. For instance, a teaspoon of oil burns much better than a teaspoon of lemon juice.
Countless observations show that we get more energy from high-calorie things than we do from low-calorie things. Simply put, calorie counts are the only reliable way to quantitatively judge a food’s impact on our weight.
Recorded data from these observations allow apps like ours to crunch the numbers and provide meaningful results for those seeking weight loss and better health.
Running the Count
Remember that: You will lose weight if you eat less than you need to maintain current weight. No ifs or buts or maybes.
Therefore, every person who wants to lose weight should count calories.
Think about it like a running ledger, where total energy spent on BMR and physical activity should exceed incoming energy from the diet (foods consumed).
Calculate how many calories your body needs per day or meal to maintain its current weight, then work out how much your body will have to get from itself if it cannot get enough from what you eat.
An Active Process
Count the calories in the meals you will eat, so that you eat fewer than you need. Each person typically sticks to a fairly predictable diet of foods they have eaten before, so it is surprisingly easy to actively record meals and snacks.
Count how many calories you ate, so that you can subtract that amount from the target amount to see how much more you can eat before exceeding your target.
Keep a record of your weight and calorie intake so that you can constantly change as your body changes. It is good training to write all of this on a piece of paper, but much simpler to use this website!
Who are we?
calcount is a group of friends who are passionate about healthy body weight through calorie control. Our lifestyles differ wildly but we share one common, burning interest: food calories and nutrition. We like food very much, and because we like it so much we try to control it.
Control is ultimately what life boils down to. We take control of the air when we take it out of the space around us and trap it in our lungs. We control our destiny when we exercise our free will. We gain control of our families and friends when we offer ourselves to be controlled by them.
We understand that, to control our body weight, we must control our calorie intake. We know that, to control our health and well-being, we must understand our food.
We are the guy at the barbecue who knows where the basted ribs came from and how to do a dead-lift. We are the girlfriend at the baby shower who can tell you which chip dip to avoid and how to monitor your circadian rhythm. We are the calcount team.
What do we do?
We care deeply about what is in our food, and what impact different activities and lifestyle choices have on our wellness.
Our team researches and shares a massive database of food information.
We make tools available to people who want to take control of their food calories.
We write articles to inform, motivate, and entertain the thousands of people who read our blog.
We have fun and learn along the way!
What we do not do
calcount does not offer all of the answers and we do not profess to know everything there is to know about calorie control.
If you know of any magic weight control system or potion which allows a person to effortlessly drop the kilos, please let us know, because we certainly do not!
Nothing we publish is medical advice, so please speak to your doctor before doing anything we might recommend.
We do not guarantee the accuracy of the information we publish, but we try very hard to make sure that all of it is correct. Everything goes through our comprehensive verification process and we don’t publish anything we are not confident in.
Contact Us
Please write to us at theteam @ caloriecounter.com.au or use the form below to contact us if you have any questions, suggestions or comments. All welcome!
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