“When you go to the grocery store, you find that the cheapest calories are the ones that are going to make you the fattest -- the added sugars and fats in processed foods.”
- Michael Pollan

Many people are under the impression that eating healthily, and thereby eating fewer calories, is expensive. When you actually sit down and add up the cost of convenience food and fast food meals, you would be very surprised to find that eating badly can be expensive and that eating healthily doesn’t have to cost a fortune, if you know how to shop correctly.

Calories are used to refer to how much energy is contained in the foods you eat. Every time you consume a meal, you will take in a variable amount of calories depending on which foods you choose. Likewise, calories are also what you expend when you participate in any form of physical activity from running a marathon to reading this sentence on your computer screen.

Even if you were to lie in bed all day long without moving, you would still burn a significant number of calories just to exist, which is commonly referred to as your basal metabolic rate.

When you consume more calories than your body requires to maintain its weight, you will see weight gain. Likewise, when you consume fewer calories than your body requires to maintain its weight you will see a combination of body fat loss and muscle gain -- depending, of course, on the type of calories and whether you are performing resistance exercise training.

In order to alter your body composition, you need to tailor your caloric balance through exercise and diet to either provide enough calories to synthesize new body tissue (build muscle) or use up excess body tissue for energy (lose fat).

Once you can get this caloric equation correct, you’ll find that it becomes much easier to reach your physical goals.
Calories on AM

You’ll often read information here about how to boost your calorie burn from exercise or ways to shave down the calories from the foods you eat. By using these tips and making sure you are counting calories, at least initially to get an idea where you stand, you can quickly transform your body to the ideal image you’d prefer.

We have easy to follow tips whether your goal is to cut down or take more calories in for lean mass building.


Calories fact

When you see the “calories burned” readout on many of the cardio machines you use, don’t be so quick to automatically assume this is entirely accurate. Often these machines can be very off and are giving you more of an approximation.

If you had to input your current body weight the reading will be more accurate than if you didn’t, but you still shouldn’t use this to dictate how much food should be added to your diet to obtain your desired body weight goal.