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An energy budget is a balance sheet of energy income against expenditure. It is studied in the field of Energetics which deals with the study of energy transfer and transformation from one form to another. Calorie is the basic unit of measurement. An organism in a laboratory experiment is an open thermodynamic system, exchanging energy with its surroundings in three ways - heat, work and the potential energy of biochemical compounds.
Organisms use ingested food resources as building blocks in the synthesis of tissues and as fuel in the metabolic process that power this synthesis and other physiological processes. Some of the resources are lost as waste products. All these aspects of metabolism can be represented in energy units. The basic model of energy budget may be shown as:
P = C - R - U - F or
P = C - or