So I’m trying to get fit — I’m already fit but trying to optimize it, you know? But generally had never looked into food and stuff.
Most nights I make a concoction of rice and ground turkey. Today the ratio was 1.5 lbs of ground turkey to 2 cups of (unboiled) white rice, which obviously expands to about 3 times it’s volume, so equivalently was 6 cups of rice. I didn’t eat all of this in one sitting, but it’s good for about 2 dinners for me.
I was reading about calories, and the rice has a lot of calories while the turkey somehow has very little. But then the rice is also a carbohydrate? I know these things fundamentally, but now I’m at the point of trying to understand and apply that knowledge.
Can someone what these things are?
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Calories are energy. Eat too much energy, it sits there and sticks to your body. Eat less, and the stuff *already* in your body gets used for energy.
Protein builds your body. Without enough protein and calories, your body eats its own building blocks. With extra protein and calories, your body (can, if you work out) use energy to add more building blocks.
Carbs are big chains of sugar. Your body needs them to make everything else work right, but too many of them will stick to your body until you burn it off. (Keto dieters use ketones, instead, which is a whole different ELI5.)
So you can break down food into Fiber, Carb, Protien, Fat.
Fiber is roughage, helps things move through your system, slows absorbtion. Dirt Cheap.
Carbs are easy fuel, mostly calories. Cheap.
Protien is hard fuel, mostly building blocks for your muscles. Expensive.
Fats are easy fuel, mostly calories, needed for nerves and brains. Less cheap.
Carbohydrates are sugars, starches, and dietary fiber.
Calories are a measure of how much energy is in food. We measure it by burning food and seeing how much heat is produced. Our bodies are burning food through chemistry.
Proteins are materials made of chains of amino acids (molecules that have 2 carbon atoms, 4 hydrogen atoms, 2 oxygen atoms and something else attached).
Rice is mostly starch. Carbohydrates are high in calories (lots of energy), except fiber, which we can’t digest and we poop it out.
Turkey is mostly water and protein with a bit of fat. Protein has less calories than carbohydrates.
If you eat more calories than your body can use, your body will tend to take the carbohydrates and convert them to body fat. Some of the protein will be converted into other stuff, but lots of it will end up in your pee and poo.
1.5 lbs of turkey has about 1300 calories, and 2 cups uncooked rice about 1500 calories. That’s roughly the suggested daily number of calories for an active male under age 35. When you get older, you will require fewer calories.
I haven’t seen anyone say this yet, and please correct me if I’m wrong:
The three macronutrients (not counting alcohol here) are carbs, fats, proteins. Each gram of a given macronutrient has a fixed value of calories. IIRC it’s something like 4 kcal per gram of protein/carb, and 9 kcal per gram of fat. However, there’s also a thermic effect – carbs are easy to burn and protein is hard to burn, so your body spends differing amounts of energy to process each.
That might be why protein is so damn filling and carbs/fats less so.
Anyway, remember that calories are a unit of energy measurement, and macronutrients provide you with energy amounts that we count in calories. That should clear up the mystery of your rice. It is made of carbohydrates, and carbohydrates are processed by your body into energy which is measured in calories.
This is the wrong sub to ask. Try a fitness sub. We don’t know the credentials of these folks
Don’t complicate things. All you should focus on if trying to get fit is calories and protein.
Try to get enough protein without exceeding your daily caloric intake to suit your goal.
Calories are energy cells (glucose and ketones), carbs and fat provide higher energy cells for the same mass than protein cause protein need extra steps to be converted into energy cells and is anyway mostly used by the body to replace/create old bodycells.
The only type of energy cells that can be stored as fat in our body are carbs (glucose). Fat that we eat cannot be stored efficiently compared to carbs. Fat that is used by the body as energy cells are directly converted into ketones, otherwise fat is then used for some kind of essential cells creation (lots of hormones, & many specific bodycells).
Calories are the amount of energy you get out of food.
Carbohydrates (Carbs), Proteins, and Lipids (fats) are what we call “macro nutrients”. They are the three types of food we eat. There’s also the fourth group, alcohol, which provides a lot of calories but no other nutritional benefits.
Generally speaking, carbohydrates provide energy. Proteins help with muscle growth/maintenance. And fats help with a lot of organs particularly the brain.
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