Have you noticed it? There is a bunch of information on the Internet about “calorie types.”

I’ve seen articles claiming that “there are three types of calories: carbohydrates, protein and fat.” I”ve seen articles focused on “the types of calories to eat when gaining weight” or discussing “why calorie type makes a difference.”

These writers are seriously misinformed!

To give you some perspective here, we use inches to measure length, pounds to measure weight and calories to measure energy.

Pounds don’t come in “flavors”, inches don’t come in “colors” and calories don’t come in “types.” To talk like this just wouldn’t make any sense (except perhaps in poetry).

We can however, talk about things like the amount of energy in food. We can also talk about the amount of energy you burn when you perform some task, such as walking, raking leaves of shoveling snow.

In either case, we would talk about these energy amounts in terms of calories.

Different foods contain different amounts of energy. In the same way that it takes way more feathers to make a pound than it does of coal, it takes way more celery to hold 200 calories than it does of chocolate.

This sort of “food science” is the basis for some diet programs. It should also be one of the cornerstones of your lifestyle eating strategy. When we say we feel “full”, one of the things involved is this idea about the amount of food compared to the amount of calories. There is more to it than just this, but we can”t go that deep in this article.

But we can note that one of the factors that go into feeling “satisfied” is the volume of food we have eaten. Clearly if we can eat more food while taking in fewer calories, we are more likely to feel satisfied while at the same time, be less likely to gain weight.

The notion that there are “types” of calories needs to be replaced with the idea that different foods contain different amounts of energy.

Also, if weight loss is our goal, then what we ultimately want to do is burn more calories during the day with our activities than we take in when we eat.