What is Energy?

Energy is a word one often hears. People say they get energy from all sorts of things and sometimes I must admit that I am not sure what they mean. There aren't many calories in vegetables, but I often hear someone say he/she gets energy from eating a lot of vegetables. Well... that is in fact also what I have experienced, but I wonder if the word energy is the right word to describe what is going on, why one feels so much better by eating a lot of vegetables.

I myself would rather think of energy as just calories, those units that measure how much energy you get from the food. There aren't very many calories in 100 grams of vegetables. Not as many as in olive oil for an example. I don't think I could possibly get the calories I need to run a marathon just from vegetables. Or rather, I know I have to eat something else. Vegetables are healthy and if you want to be healthy it is wise to consume a lot of them. But that doesn't mean they are the ideal food for strenuous runs or walks out there in the mountains. Then it is easier to get the calories from something easily accessible for the body. Fruit sugar or fructose gets easily into the blood stream and you get the energy you need almost immediately.

At the same time you can count on that fructose is not what you need if you don't move much. Fructose is very common. It is in most of the prepared food you can get these days and it can be hard to avoid it. Fructose is a kind of sugar and it doesn't matter if the name of the sugar is fructose, corn syrup, agave syrup or what it is.

Sugar isn't good for the body if you sit still. Nevertheless it is the main source of calories for many of us. I would call that energy. Energy you don't need if you aren't going to exercise.

When people talk about weight loss, it seems as if the most important thing is to be able to eat as much as you use to. Like the method of just eating less is useless. Why is that? Why is it so important to eat much? Well... if you move a lot, then you have to eat more to maintain the same body weight. But that isn't enough for most of us if we want to lose considerable amounts of weight. Then we have to eat fewer calories as well.

The method I use is counting calories both the ones I burn when running and the ones I consume. And I try not to get too many of the calories I eat from carbohydrates like sugar or starch. The calories in vegetables are mostly carbs also, but that is ok because there are loads of fibres and other important things there.