You have paid attention the nutrition information on products at least once, haven’t you? And you have, probably, seen that nutrition value is generally listed in calories, kilojoules or may be both all depending in what country you live. Here you will find the calculations in calories (kcal) or kilojoules (kJ).

Calories and kilojoules both represent a measure of the energy contained in the foods we eat and our body fat. Foods provide our bodies with energy and therefore they are able to function. Our bodies also tend to store some fat in order to use in some case in future.

Spending energy means that we burn calories. When we burn more calories than we obtain, the body turns to these fat stores to get energy from there. Contrariwise, when we eat more and get more calories than our body uses to get energy, we tend to gain weigh. Therefore, the golden rule of weight loss is that you should eat fewer calories than you burn, otherwise you will gain.

Balancing Calories

Calories also are understood as measurement of how much energy our body needs both simply to function and for various activities. It is possible to count your daily calorie intake in order to state how much you actually need to maintain the weight you have and not to gain more.

Under calorie deficit is understood a figure that shows how many more calories you need to burn each day than you eat:

calories eaten - calories burned = calorie deficit

After you decide the calorie deficit you'd like to adhere to, use the Food Calculator in order to decide how much you heed to eat. Another thing you should use is the Activity Calculator as it will help to understand how much you should work out. Another option is to eat less and exercise more.

Technical Notes

Under calorie is understood the unit of energy measure needed to raise 1 gram of water by 1°C. A joule is a unit of electrical energy equal to the work done when a current of one ampere is passed through a resistance of one ohm for one second. The latter is generally used in the physical sciences. We use these terms as similar processes preserve our body temperature and perform other bodily functions.

Calories and joules are so small and this served as the reason to refer to them in multiples of 1,000. Therefore labels read kilocalories or kcal, kilojoules or kJ.

1 calorie = 4.184 joules
1 kilocalorie (kcal) = 4.184 kilojoules (kJ)

Kilocalories are frequently referred as Calories in various scientific and educational communities. But people simply call them calories. Therefore a food label indicating 500 calories actually means kilocalories.