I’ve Never Met A Calorie I Didn’t Like

Any idea what a calorie is? You’ve heard about them, I’m sure, but any idea what one is? A calorie is the unit used to calculate the energy value of food. Up until weight loss plans started using ‘calorie counting’ in the formula it probably didn’t matter what a calorie was. I know in my years (and I mean years) of study related to food (and mostly the enjoyment of it) I have grown to accept the calorie as a friend rather than the bad guy he has been made out to be. Sure, I have joked many times about breaking a cookie in half so the calories would fall out before eating it but in actual fact, I think that without calories we’d have no energy in our bodies to fight off germs, disease and a whole lot of other things. There was an actual point when us humanoids got a lot lazier (about the time when television was invented) when we quit burning off more calories than we consumed and started to get chunkier rather than hunkier. Add remote controls and microwave ovens to the mix and before you knew it, we didn’t have to lift a finger (well, okay, maybe that was all we needed to lift) to get anything done. That was when our friend the calorie started to become our enemy. Well, I still like calories. I don’t count them because it seems pointless to me as they just seem to jump up and latch on to me wherever I go. They have a way of luring me into their activities and it’s probably because I keep letting them win. My lovely Sweet Roast and I used to go for evening walks in the neighbourhood. Often we’d be gone for an hour. Not bad at all if you think about it, until I mention that a Dairy Queen happens to be on our route and even if we said we weren’t going to stop, we’d hear the calories calling our names. At first is was pretty easy to ignore because it was just the coffee or iced tea calories that knew our names. Then the ice cream calories found out who we were and, well, they got pretty loud. At times, painfully loud. Impressive when you consider the Dairy Queen is in actual fact a ten-minute walk from our home and our hour-long walks involved only about twenty minutes of actual walking. Oh, and about forty minutes of getting friendly with calories.