Burn Notice: The Hers Guide To Calories

To reach your body goals, understanding what a calorie really is, and what it means for your body, is essential.

- Adam Bible

GETTING TO A CERTAIN HEALTH GOAL—whether you want to lose weight, get stronger, or just have your body operate better—requires more than just a gym plan and some suggested foods to eat. You need to thoroughly understand everything that goes into your body—and it should all start with the most elemental aspect of every food: the calorie. You need to know what exactly calories are, how many are in your food, and how you can manipulate them to your own exercise ends in order to really build a better body. With this in mind, we’ve put together a guide to fully understand and ultimately burn the calorie.

What is a Calorie?

Simply put, a calorie is a unit of food energy, a way to understand how much energy the proteins, carbs, and fats—and sugar and alcohol—in food give our bodies when we eat them. What our body doesn’t use at first gets stored away as fat.