We often hear about the term calories and its relationship to the body and its health, especially among professional athletes or in sports clubs. What do we mean by this term? Is this issue related to athletes and adults only? Shouldn't the kids be concerned about this?
Calories are the mathematical expression of the energy that the body derives from the various foods a person eats during the day.
The body consumes the calories it needs to carry out its daily functions. If there is an excess, it will be stored in the body in the form of fat, while if the calories are less than enough to carry out daily activities, the body consumes part of the stock that is represented in fat.
Calories are the fuel that the body uses to do any physical activity, no matter how small, in addition to being the most important component of a healthy diet.
But as we mentioned earlier, producing more calories than the body needs will inevitably lead to storing them in the body as fat, and this is often undesirable. (By production here we mean the process of converting food into calories by the body).
On the other hand, producing fewer calories than the body needs will push the body to consume the calories stored in the body in advance in the form of fat. Burning fat may be a good and desirable thing for most of us, but it must be in a deliberate and not random way.
The body's need for calories varies according to several factors, the most important of which are age, gender, and type of activity.
A child in the first years of his life needs less than what a teenager needs, among them a teenager who practices sports regularly needs more calories than a teenager with a low level of activity.
But there is an average that can be relied upon to know the number of calories that a person who engages in an average activity during the day needs, which is estimated at an hour per day. This hour includes all the activities that the child does, starting with the steps he walks to school to exercise.
