How to Count Calories Accurately (and Why You May Need To)
If you want to start tracking how many calories you eat—for weight loss, weight gain, or just out of curiosity—here’s a tutorial. Tracking calories is pretty easy once you get the hang of it, but getting started can be confusing. However, with the right tools and the right habits, you’ll be successful at counting your calories in no time.
What are calories and why do people count them?
Calories are a measure of energy. For example, the more you exercise, the more calories you need to maintain that activity. Everything you eat has a calorie number attached to it (whether it’s on the label or not). In general, we consume about the same number of calories as we burn.
Surprisingly, our bodies can maintain a roughly constant weight, making us hungrier if we haven’t eaten enough calories today, or making us feel full if we’ve eaten a lot of them. However, consistently eating less food than you burn leads to weight loss; Eating more food than you burn leads to weight gain.
How do I know how many calories I should eat?
Most of the time, you should eat about the same number of calories your body burns each day. This number varies from person to person. A 4-foot-9, 100-pound woman who does only light exercise can burn 1,440 calories per day. A six-foot tall, 280-pound man who does heavy workouts twice a day can burn 4,309 pounds. Most of us fall somewhere in the middle, in the 2,000 to 3,000 calorie range.
Here I will talk more about burning calories . Although food labels list a 2,000-calorie diet to calibrate the “Daily Value” of various nutrients, the truth is that each of us burns a different number of calories, and most of us burn more than 2,000. (A few years ago, the average the figure for adults was 2,350. The FDA eventually settled on 2,000, in part because it believed the rounded number was easier to understand.)
Therefore, if you want to lose weight, you need to eat a little less than you burn. If you want to gain weight (as many people do when trying to build muscle), you need to eat more calories than you burn. A good rule of thumb is to subtract 200-500 calories from what you burn and that will be a good number for weight loss. If you’re trying to make a profit, do the opposite.
Now that you understand the logic, you just need an initial estimate of how many calories you burn. If you’re already tracking calories, you can probably tell by what you typically eat when your weight is stable. Otherwise, enter your information into a TDEE (total daily energy expenditure) calculator, such as the one at tdeecalculator.net . Remember that any number calculated is only an estimate , and you will eventually know if it is correct by noticing what happens to your weight when you eat that number.
If you use a Fitbit or other gadget that estimates your daily calorie expenditure, this is also a good place to get a starting number. Just remember that this is also a rough estimate, and it could still vary by a few hundred calories either way .
How to find out how many calories are in a food?
The easiest way to find out the calorie content of a product is to look at its label. Or, if your food doesn’t have a label, look up the name of the food plus “calories” and note the serving size and source of information. For example, when I Google “apple calories,” I get a result that says that an average apple, about 3 inches in diameter, contains 95 calories. The source is the US Department of Agriculture, which maintains a database of common foods. Here is an entry about apples . The default serving is 100 grams, but you can change the “serving” dropdown to show a medium apple.
When you eat at a restaurant, the calorie count is sometimes displayed next to each item. If not, visit the restaurant’s website or search for the restaurant’s name and “nutrition information.” Often hidden somewhere on their website is a PDF with calorie counts and often other information such as protein and carbohydrate content.
However, there is an easier way that people usually use to track calories: you use a calorie tracking app.
What’s the best calorie tracking app?
There are plenty of good (or at least not terrible) calorie tracking apps out there. My pick is Cronometer : it has all the features you need even in the free version, and it doesn’t have any goals, so you can use it whether you’re trying to gain weight, lose weight or not.
The most popular calorie tracking app is probably MyFitnessPal, which is confusing because it’s probably the worst app out there. Calorie information is often inaccurate, the interface is fairly straightforward about weight loss whether you’re interested in it or not, and basic features like a barcode scanner are only available in the paid version. We have a review of MyFitnessPal alternatives here .
When you use an app to track calories, you’ll search the app for the food you just ate (or are about to eat). This practice will feel clunky at first: you’ll have to select the correct food from a database and then try to figure out how big a portion you just ate. Packaged foods are the easiest to keep track of, which adds extra wrinkles if you’re also trying to eat more whole foods or homemade foods. Face it, though: Habits are skills , and as you develop all the mini-skills that make up calorie tracking, habit becomes second nature.
How do I choose the exact portion size for the food I’m tracking?
As you get more practice, you’ll get pretty good at navigating portion sizes. But as you get used to it, get into the habit of measuring or weighing your food whenever you can. At this stage, for example, I can quite accurately see the difference between a cup of rice and half a cup of rice. I know that a three-ounce portion of meat is about the size of a deck of cards or a little smaller than your palm (depending on how big your hand is, I guess). A “serving” of peanut butter is two tablespoons; Measure it at least once to see if your normal serving is larger or smaller.
To be more specific, you can start using a food scale . It makes your life easier in many ways. For example, you can:
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Place the toast on the scale, zero it, and then spread it with peanut butter. Weigh your peanut butter toast and you’ll know exactly how many grams of peanut butter you used.
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Weigh out your desired portion of chicken, vegetables, or anything else you eat.
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Divide the food equally by weighing it whole and then weighing each portion so that it contains ¼ of the total (if you are preparing a four-serving meal).
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Place a container of, say, yogurt on the scale and reset it to zero. You can then transfer the yogurt from this container into a blender while you prepare the smoothie. This requires the “negative tare” feature, but it’s great when you’re adding ingredients to containers you can’t weigh directly, like a blender or pot on the stove. You simply weigh the container the food comes from .
How to count calories in homemade food?
Your calorie tracking app should have the ability to create a recipe. Add ingredients and be sure to indicate how many servings the recipe makes if you’re cooking for a group or making multiple servings for a meal prep . Be sure to include all ingredients including oil and seasonings.
How to count calories in food that someone else prepared?
If you don’t know exactly what something contains, you can guess. The easiest way is to find similar food in a restaurant and estimate the portion.
What should I do if there is oil or sauce in my food and I don’t eat it all?
Unfortunately, it is not so easy to make adjustments here. You may be leaving behind a ton of calories, but mathematically separating them from the other components you ate will be difficult. In this case, I just pretend I ate the whole thing, sauce and all. If there’s a ton of sauce and I’m sure I’m leaving a lot of calories, I’ll record it as 0.9 instead of one serving.
Do I need to track everything, every day?
There are no food tracking police (thank god), so no, you don’t have to do anything. But if you’re trying to get a roughly accurate estimate of how many calories you eat each day, you really should write everything down as best you can. If you snack on a cookie, put the cookie in your app.
Sometimes I miss a whole day of tracking but don’t record part of the day. If I eat 1200 calories before dinner and then go to a party and eat 15 different little things that can’t be accurately tracked, I might say “screw it” and cross out the entire day. But I wouldn’t keep it at 1200 because in hindsight it may seem like there were only 1200 calories all day. If I know I ate more than usual and want that reflected in the tracking, I’ll select a placeholder like restaurant food (my app actually has a Thanksgiving entry) and record whatever brings me. Let’s say 3000 calories of this.
Likewise, it’s tempting to not journal about foods you think you “shouldn’t” eat, but this backfires. In fact, if I was eating 2,500 calories and only recording 2,000, I would look at my app and think, “Wow, I’m eating 2,000 calories and not losing weight.” I would start to feel like I needed to eat even less than 2000 and I could get into one of those vicious cycles where I would limit myself to small portions and then find myself eating even more untracked “cheat” meals. This is not a healthy way of eating , and it only gets worse over time. Instead, I write it all down. If I knew I was eating 2,500 calories and not losing weight, I could appreciate the fact that my body could use 2,500 calories beneficially each day. Then I’d eat a little less – maybe 2200 – and see if that might be a more effective and sustainable approach.
Or to put it another way: if you write everything down, you can be honest with yourself and kinder to yourself. You just need to look at the numbers as neutral data and not as a judgment on whether you are “good.”