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.”

Frankly, in reading this stuff, I’m not sure whether to shed tears of laughter or of pity.

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

Since calories measure energy, talking about types of calories is as senseless as taking about types of inches, or types of pounds.

Talking about types of calories doesn’t make any sense, but talking about the quantity of calories does. Some foods are packed with lots of energy, some not. Some activities take lots of energy, some not.

In both of these cases, we would talk about the amount of energy involved using the word “calories.”

So different foods can have their calories packed in “tighter.” It takes just a handful of coal to equal the same weight as a big bag of feathers. It is a similar kind of thing when you compare a small piece of cheesecake to a pile of celery.

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.

We can however say that the amount of food we eat helps us to feel full and satisfied. And if we can get that full feeling by eating more while keeping our calories less, we run less risk of becoming overweight.

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

And we now know that to lose fat, we need to burn more calories than we eat.