Your Caloric Intake and Output

by Carl Juneau

What is the caloric balance? The caloric balance is the
difference between your intake and expenditure of energy.

IN - OUT = BALANCE

Your IN
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
The human body uses the energy gained from consuming food in
two main ways: to
fuel the metabolism when resting and for physical
activities.

Resting metabolic rate The resting metabolic rate refers to
the energy your body spends when you're awake but inactive
in a fasted state at room temperature. It is, basically, the
minimum amount of energy it needs to keep your cells alive.
That 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 spending calories big time.
Actually, you might be surprised to learn that, for most
people, the resting metabolic rate is the largest source of
daily energy expenditure.

Physical activity
Obviously you spend energy whenever you move. From your bed
to the shower in the morning, from home to work or school,
and any other activity. Even when you're sitting or
standing, your muscles expend energy so you can keep
yourself up. The amount of energy you spend that way in a
day will depend on what you do: some people don't need to do
much physical activity like the office worker who
travels by car and some do a lot more physically demanding
labor i.e. a manual worker, or someone
who walks or bikes a lot.

Sport and physical exercise also increase the amount of
energy spent that way by a good margin. For example, a 121
pounds 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 (complete sedentary lifestyle) and 50 %
(athlete) of your daily caloric expense. The bottom line is:
the more physically active you are, the more physical
activity counts toward and increases your daily caloric
expense.

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, since it is used when you
train and constantly rebuilds itself to sustain its daily
effort. As we have seen, energy use 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 physical activity in that same
day.

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