What is an energy balance? The caloric balance is balancing your eating and your physical expending of the energy you intake from consuming food.
IN – OUT = BALANCE
Your Intake
As human beings, we draw our energy from food. The amount of energy provided by a food is commonly measured in calories (Cal). For example, a medium size apple contains 72 calories, a glass (250 mL) of 2% fat milk, 128, an egg (50 g), 78, and McDonald’s Big Mac, 5632.
The sum of all the food you eat in a day (your intake for that day) is called the daily caloric intake (DCI). That is, the more food you eat in a day, the higher your daily caloric intake is, and vice versa. The average daily intake, in the US, was 2,618 calories for men and 1,877 calories for women in the year 1999-2000.
Your OUT
Your body spends the energy you get from eating in two ways: when you aren’t doing anything and when you are doing something.
Resting Metabolic Rate
The resting metabolic rate is the energy your body spends when you’re awake but inactive in normal conditions. It is the minimum amount of energy that your body has to use to survive. This list of functions include includes tissue regeneration, regulation of the body’s temperature, breathing, blood circulation and filtering, and hormonal and nervous activity. These functions are carried out by your liver, brain, heart, kidneys and muscles; these organs and tissues stay active, even when you’re not. Thus, even when you’re resting, you’re actually spending a lot of calories. To some people’s surprise, you spend more calories for resting the nearly any other activity throughout the day.
Physical Activity
You have to spend energy to do anything. Other things, that involve motion and work, use, of course, more energy. Whether it’s moving from your bed to the shower in the morning, from home to work or school, and so on. Even when you’re sitting or standing, your muscles spend energy so you can maintain good posture. The amount of energy you spend that way in a day on what you do. Someone who does a lot of physical activity obviously uses more than someone who sits around all day. For example, people who bike to work use more than those who drive.
Sport and physical exercise also increase the amount of energy spent on physical activity. For example, a 121 pound individual would spend roughly 75 calories per hour when sitting, 200 when shopping and about 450 when walking at a fast pace. Ultimately, physical activity can account for between 20 (little or no physical activity) and 50 % (athletic activity) of your daily caloric expense. In conclusion, the more physically active you are, the more physical activity increases your daily caloric output.
Interestingly, exercise affects your OUT in two ways: first, it raises the energy you use the days you are involved in physical activities. Second, in the long run and as you slowly build muscle, it increases your resting metabolic rate. The fact is that a pound of muscle is a lot more “active”, scientifically, than a pound of fat.
Muscle contracts when you move, as it is put to work when you exercise and constantly rebuilds itself to keep at maximum ability for your daily movements. As we have seen, energy output can also be calculated in calories. Your daily caloric expense (DCE) is the sum of the energy required by your metabolism at rest in a day, plus the energy used to do other physical activity.
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categories: Dieting,Nutrition,Health,Fitness,Weight Loss