As you can imagine calories impact our bodyweight and our bodyweight impacts our health. Calories are literally the building blocks and energy needed to keep our body alive.

 

One of the best-documented findings throughout the history of nutrition research is that your calorie balance is the only determining factor of your long-term bodyweight. This means if we exclude changes in water retention and other short-term factors, how much you eat will determine what you weigh.

 

In fact, bodyweight and calorie intake have a near 1:1 relationship, which is why it’s so important to watch them. Watching them doesn’t always mean that you have to track them perfectly, but it does mean that you should be able to estimate your daily calorie needs and know how to meet them.

 

The truth is that you can eat only healthy foods, time your meals perfectly, and take the best supplements, but still gain weight if you don’t control your calorie intake. So if you want to lose weight, you have to have a calorie deficit in place before anything else.

 

Vice versa, if you want to gain weight you have to have a calorie surplus in place before anything else. With this in mind let’s take a look at the relationship between body weight and health. Obviously, if over a long period of time you don’t provide your body with sufficient calories and energy you will see a decrease in overall health.

 

Due to the close relationship between calories and bodyweight, you can estimate if you are getting enough energy simply by looking at your weight. If it falls within the range of healthy weights for your height and age, you are probably getting enough energy and calories for ideal health.

 

If however, you fall under or over the ideal range, chances are that your health is or will be compromised in the future. In terms of proportion to other aspects of your diet, more than half of your of the total health effect of your diet will come down to bodyweight and therefore calorie balance. Let see what happens when you are under or overweight

 

 

 

If you don’t supply your body with sufficient calories, your weight will eventually decrease to a point where your health will begin to suffer. Even though the logical endpoint of this is starvation, your health begins to suffer long before you need to worry about survival.

 

Being underweight for too long will deprive your body of the building blocks and energy needed to maintain your immune system, which is why underweight people are more susceptible to infections and diseases. You will get sick more often and revocer slower. Another problem is that calories are needed to maintain bone and muscle mass, which will suffer in a low-calorie environment.

 

This leads to fatigue and higher risks of fractures. This is especially true for the elderly, which are already at high risk of bone conditions. Sports performance will also suffer as your body will not be able to activate as much muscle tissue. Put together, this means there is such a thing as
being too skinny.

 

 

 

Unfortunately, in most developed countries the number of overweight people is increasing along with the health risks associated with excess body weight. The reason for this is not always the weight per se but the excess body fat, which impinges health. First of all, a large amount of body fat weights down the body and wears down knees and other joints
more quickly. Larger tissue masses also require more blood to be pumped through them, which leads to high blood pressure and a higher risk of heart problems.

 

Also, body fat stores secrete hormones which negatively affect health, by raising triglycerides and bad LDL cholesterol levels and lowering good HDL cholesterol levels. At this point, I could tell you about the other health risks associated with obesity, but let’s talk about some good news instead. Being outside the healthy weight range does not automatically lead to terrible health. Why? Because the effect your weight has on your health will be
also influenced by time.

 

Generally, how long you have been overweight affects how much long-term health damage will occur. If you have been overweight for a year or only months and plan on going back to a healthy weight then long-term effects will be minimal if not nonexistent. If however, you have been overweight all your life and don’t plan on changing anything your health will definitely deteriorate much faster than normal.

 

 

 

Now that we covered the general effects of calories and bodyweight on health, what conclusions can we draw from this for our diet plan?

 

First of all, it means the main objective of your diet should be to reach a healthy weight. Since your body weight is such an important factor in your health, the primary role of your diet should be to reach a healthy body weight. This means, if you do nothing for your diet other than watching your weight and staying within the healthy range, you will still enjoy tremendous health benefits.

 

I know it sounds unfair but those folks who eat all kinds of junk food, at irregular times can still be fairly healthy, as long as they watch their weight. Of course, not as healthy as someone who also eat quality foods, but overall calories are still a bit more important than the right food sources.

 

Another important implication is that if all you could do to improve your diet was change one thing, you would want to adjust your calories to an amount that would get your weight within the healthy range. So if you are overweight, simply eating less (or becoming more active without changing, meaning somehow reducing your daily calorie balance) would bring you the biggest advantage over any other possible change in your diet.

 

I know this sounds almost too good to be true because everyone will tell you that what you eat is important – and it is – but even more important is how much you eat and how it affects your bodyweight. To give you a drastic example: even if you got everything else but calories right, the benefit would still be smaller than if you only got calories right. A really good example of this is the twinkie diet.