Food Eaten vs. Calories Needed

[psisar]

I was wondering today... are our bodies dependant on food as much as we are calories?

Let's say for example a meal for the day:

Breakfast: Egg white omelette with salsa and rice.
1 Banana
1 Apple
1 Peach

Approx 240 Calories

Snack:

Fat free yogurt cup

60 Calories

Lunch:

40 pieces of shrimp with seafood sauce
Cup Jell-o

210 calories

Snack:

Bowl of applecauce

105 Calories

Dinner:

Piece of fish
Cup of corn
Baked potato

325 Calories

(This is just approximate)

So overall that's a litte less than 1000 (940) calories, but it's still a fair amount of food for one day. Basically what I'm wondering is if your body counts calories to know if it's getting enough food, or if just eating lots of healthy, low calorie food is good enough?

[agent709]

Yeah, that's why spacing out small meals is always noted, so that you dont crave as much

[abrannan]

There's two types of hunger. The first is empty stomach hunger, which is what most people think of as hunger, where your body has nothing to process and you get that little "pain" in your stomach. The other is more of a metabolic hunger, and it's harder to recognize. It happens when your body is looking for more energy and doesn't have any readily available, and can give you that "low blood sugar" feeling, particularly if you're coming down off of a blood sugar spike.


Spacing your food out over the day can stave off the stomach hunger, while still letting you experience a bit of the metabolic hunger, which is good as that's when your body starts going to your fat reserves.

[tama]

Goodness, very scientific! I like this thread!