How to grow your own food, P.1 Understanding your Diet.

In a year you will need to eat around 730000 calories. First off you need to understand what a calorie is, a calorie is the unit used to measure energy in food. The average person will need to eat about 2000 calories a day to stay the way they are. Those calories are called "maintenance calories."

 Of course, not all calories are the same. A carb and a fat aren't going to do the same thing for you. There's three main things you need to make sure you meet in your diet. Proteins, carbs, and fats. Its important to understand what all of those things are. 

A protein is what you eat to grow and repair your body. So when you workout and eat protein, you build muscle. Now why does that work?  Working out destroys your muscles, and your body used protein to build it back up. When eating enough protein working out makes your stronger. Working out has a bunch of positive effects, like it makes it easier to do household chores, it makes your lungs work better, it boosts your immune system, ect. 

How do you know how much protein you should eat? Take your weight, and eat 0.75 proteins for every kilo you weigh.( Or .36 per pound) You can get protein from eating meat, eggs, tofu, nuts, and foods of that sort. 

A carb is a sugar. There's nothing wrong with carbs but their only use is to help you exercise. Fun fact, your body turns carbs in fat the easiest out of any nutrients. If you don't exercise a lot or you just live a very low activity life style you should not be eating a lot of carbs, that's why one of the best ways to lose weight is to eat no carbs and exercise on an empty stomach. 

If your excising daily, your carb intake should be around the 40-50% of calories you intake. Carbs come from foods like bread, pasta, and other wheat based foods. 

A "fat" isn't the same thing as fat on your body. There is two types of fat, trans fats and unsaturated fat. you can go your whole life without eating trans fat and be extremely healthy. The type of fat you need is called unsaturated fat. Eating unsaturated fat helps with your cholesterol levels and helps your heart (and most of your organs) a lot. 

Unsaturated fat should make up 20-30% of the calories you eat in a day. Which means eating foods like nuts, seeds, olive oil, etc.

How many calories should YOU be eating? Depending on your height and weight and whether you want to maintain, lose, or gain weight will affect how many calories you need to eat. Of course you need to keep in mind, the number on the scale isn't a good indicator on how healthy you are. Muscle weights more than fat so the scale might be going up but your overall health is going down. Talking with someone like a dietitians or a nutritionists will be the best way to figure out a diet that works for you.