Do you remember the days when we talked about losing weight, the only diet terms we really needed were low fat and low calorie? My how times have changed! Let alone the whole hassle of even thinking about losing weight, there’s an absolute minefield of diet terminology to negotiate, if we want to understand which type of diet we should be following. Do they think they can bombard us with science in the hope that fancy words will endear us to their product? Maybe so, so let’s undermine them. Let’s understand what they are talking about. Here are 8 diet terms explained.
1. Just What is a Calorie?
This has to be the most common of diet terms and one that we use constantly, but do you actually know what it is? The reason we use the term ‘burn calories’ is because basically in scientific terms, a calorie is a unit of energy. It is equivalent to 4.180 joules. It represents the energy required to raise the temperature of 1 gram of water by 1 degree C. The calories from the food we consume provide the energy to keep our bodies functioning. If we eat more calorific value than we consume, the excess gets stored as fat. Simple hey?