To eat, or not to eat: that is the question

Since we are discussing about healthy eating, how much to eat to remain healthy is a big issue to some of us. I remember a poem I learned in primary school about Jack Spratt who could eat no fat, and his wife who could eat no lean.
How much we eat depends whether you are a boy or a girl, on age and how active we are. Kids our age, who are more active, burn a lot of calories ( a nutrition term meaning the amount of energy that you get from your food). Our bodies need calories to give us energy but too much calories and too little activities to burn it up, will make us fat/overweight.

Some foods (and drinks) contain more calories than others. For example, peanuts that you eat with your nasi lemak for breakfast contain a lot of calories but the cucumber that accompanies the sambal ikan bilis contains less. You can count the number of calories in the food you eat by looking at the components of food groups in your meal:
1 gram of protein - 4 calories
1 gram of carbohydrate - 4 calories
1 gram of fat - 9 calories

If you know how many grams of each one of the food group are in the food you eat, you can calculate the total calories.

For example if one serving of nasi lemak has 10 grams of fat,

total number of calories = 9 x 10 = 90 calories

If you are aware of the calories you are taking in your meals, then you can control your weight. The recommended range of calories for school-going kids like us are 1,600 to 2,500 per day.