The divide continues to grow between those who swear by the “calories in vs. calories out” method and those who tout that body composition changes will come by following a nutrient-dense whole-food diet. When counseling clients, starting out many of them have these types of pre-conceived beliefs on how they should be losing weight or making changes to their body composition overall. Acknowledging calories continue to be a hot topic of conversation, we’ll dive into the science of calories, the complexity of them and when they really matter. What is a calorie? A calorie, as we often see it on a nutrition label, is actually a kilocalorie. To make it simple for consumers, it became a Calorie with a capital C, and since then has been used so often without the capital C that we just use calorie. The true Calorie, or kilocalorie, is a measure of the energy required to raise one kilogram of water one degree Celsius. Originally, the calorie value of a food was determined by burning it, b