View all slides | Contents of this slide

Lecture Notes

So in the final few slides we'll talk about maintaining a healthy weight. Weight maintenance occurs when there's a balance between your energy intake or the calories that you take in from your essential nutrients, carbs, proteins, fat, and also the nonessential one—alcohol—as well. Alcohol is not an essential nutrient, but it does have calories, so it has to be included in the energy intake category. And you can see on the left here, if you picture this as a scale, you have your carbohydrates, your fats, your proteins, and your alcohol on the left side, and then you also have the energy that you expend on the right side. So when there's a balance between those two things you have no weight gain or loss. You're just maintaining your weight.

And you can see that in the middle when you have weight loss you would be in a negative energy balance, meaning you took in less calories than you expended.

And then finally, on the right you have a weight gain situation, or a positive energy balance, where you're taking in more calories than you are expending. And this is really (on the far right) the problem that most people have in our country, hence the obesity epidemic. Many physiological and psychological factors affect both sides of these scales.

And I want you to take some time to read in your textbook about the role that hunger and appetite play in your energy intake.

And on the next slide we'll talk about the energy that you expend. We'll talk about the right side of these scales.