In theory, the accumulation of 3500 calories equal one pound of body fat.  How do people accumulate these calories?  The answer is simple.  They all pass between our lips, through our mouth and stomach and into our intestines.  At that point, various chemical processes take over to transform our food into calories.  Since food is essential for life, it is stored as glycogen or fat.  Glycogen is the storage form of glucose.  The stores are needed for the rare times when adequate food is not readily available to fuel our various body functions. 

How much food do we really need to support life?  The amount of food needed is frequently broken down into two categories.  The first category is known as the Basal Metabolic Rate.  This measurement yields the number of calories your body needs to simply exist.  We must add to that number, the amount of calories your body needs for daily activities.  If the number of calories eaten equals the number of calories burned, weight remains stable.  If the balance is tipped, we either lose weight or gain weight.  The Basal Metabolic Rate remains fairly constant as long as your weight is steady, but the number of calories needed varies greatly day by day.  The more active you are on a daily basis, the more calories you will need on a daily basis to maintain the balance.   

What do we need to do to tip the balance to produce weight loss?  We can reduce the number of calories eaten or increase the calories burned or a little of both.  Every diet ever written strives to lower the number of calories eaten.  Each particular diet has its own particular way of doing it.  But the fact remains that whether one tries hypnosis, Weight Watchers or Jenny Craig or Atkins, the primary goal is to reduce the number of calories eaten. The better diets also take into account and encourage moderately increased activity as well as good nutrition.   

A new study published in The Journal of Physiology, performed at the Copenhagen Muscle Research Center at the University of Copenhagen, concluded that when mild exercise is performed, there is a tendency to burn relatively more fat than glucose.  As the exercise intensity increases, the muscles switches from fat utilization to glucose utilization for fuel.  Weight management people would benefit more from burning fat than glucose.  This would indicate that a lower level of exercise for a longer period of time would be most helpful.  If this study can be repeated and accepted by the scientific community, it would have implications for the treatment of diabetes and obesity. 

Again, the real basis for weight management is calorie control.  There are many ways to achieve this control.  A good healthy life style promotes a variety of foods in moderate quantities with moderate exercise.