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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]If you know, what is your daily calorie range to maintain weight?

I am 46yo 5’7 at 175lb and I was told to eat 1600 to loose weight but it’s been 2 weeks and I lost nothing. Not sedentary but not actively exercising either.  Walking around the house, doing errands etc

Curious if it’s just my slow metabolism or is it normal. [/quote]

Calories are rather pointless as a measure of energy. Calories are measured in a bomb calorimeter. The item being tested is put in an oxygen-filled chamber that is placed in water weighing 1 kg. The item is burned. The temperature of the water is measured. For every degree Celsius the water rose, we say the item had 1 Calorie. Is that really how you think your body uses the energy from food? Absolutely not! Your body gets energy from a complex set of chemical processes. Not all Calories are the same. You could burn wood and raise the temperature of water. Go ahead and eat that wood, though, and you'll find your body cannot digest and process it. Protein is supposed to have 4 Calories per gram, the same as a carbohydrate. However, protein cannot be used by the body efficiently as a source of energy, and heat creation in the process means something like 30% of that potential energy is lost.

Then some people are highly inefficient at breaking down and processing carbohydrates. Hormones in their bodies promote the storage of glucose into fat cells and prevent their use as energy. Such a person will gain fat from eating a donut or bread and have no ability to use that energy. To make things even more interesting, food labels are allowed to be off by as much as 20%, so you really have no idea how many "Calories" you take in, even if Calories meant anything. Finally, the other half of any weight loss/gain equation is how much energy you use. Oh, that is a feedback look and partially depends on how much you eat and what you eat! In other words, you may use less energy as a result of eating less food! So you can't know how much energy you "burn."

Therefore, Calories are pretty much pointless as an energy source for your body.[/quote]

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