How to Accurately Count Calories (and Why You Might Want To)

If you’re looking to start tracking your calorie intake—whether for weight loss , gain, or just out of curiosity—here’s a quick guide. Tracking calories or macronutrients (or both) is fairly easy once you get the hang of it, but getting started can be challenging. However, with the right tools and the right habits, you’ll be on your way to managing your calorie intake in no time.

Why do people count calories?

Calories are a measure of energy. For example, the more you exercise, the more calories you need to sustain that activity. Every food you eat is assigned a calorie count (whether it’s listed on the label or not). Overall, we consume and burn roughly the same number of calories.

Surprisingly, our bodies can maintain a relatively stable weight by increasing hunger if we haven’t eaten enough calories today, or by creating a feeling of fullness if we’ve eaten a lot. Consistently consuming fewer calories than we burn leads to weight loss; consuming more calories than we burn leads to weight gain.

What are macros and why do people track them?

Macronutrients are the basic components of food: fat, protein, and calories. These are the main components of our food, and they are where our calories come from. (Water and alcohol are also technically macronutrients, but they are typically not included in macronutrient calculations.)

Tracking macronutrients is essential to ensure you’re getting enough protein , to maintain energy during workouts, or to consult with a dietitian to help you balance your calorie intake. Calorie tracking apps typically also show how many grams of each macronutrient you’re getting at each meal and throughout the day.

How do I know how many calories I need to consume?

In most cases, you should consume roughly the same number of calories per day as your body burns. This number varies from person to person. A woman who is 5’1″ and weighs 100 pounds and does only light exercise might burn 1,440 calories per day. A man who is 6’1″ and weighs 280 pounds and does intense workouts twice a day might burn 4,309 calories. Most of us consume somewhere in the middle, between 2,000 and 3,000 calories per day.

I discuss calorie burning in more detail here . Although food labels use a 2,000-calorie diet to calibrate “daily values” for various nutrients, in reality, each of us burns a different number of calories, and most of us burn more than 2,000. (The average for adults used to be 2,350. The FDA eventually settled on 2,000, in part because it felt a round number was easier to understand.)

So, if you want to lose weight, you need to consume slightly fewer calories than you burn. If you want to gain weight—as many do when trying to build muscle—you need to consume more calories than you burn. A good rule of thumb is to subtract 200-500 calories per day from what you burn, which will be optimal for weight loss. Do the opposite if you’re trying to gain weight.

You may think of calorie burning in the context of exercise, but remember that you also burn calories just by moving. Our bodies require about 100 calories per hour just to maintain cell function, brain function, and blood circulation. So, if your watch shows you burned 300 calories during a run, that’s in addition to the approximately 2,000 calories you burn throughout the day.

Now that you understand the logic, you just need to roughly estimate how many calories your body burns on a typical day. If you’re already tracking calories, you can probably figure this out based on what you typically eat when your weight is stable. For example, if you consume an average of 2,300 calories and aren’t gaining or losing weight, then your “maintenance calorie” is 2,300. If you don’t have a baseline, enter your data into a TDEE (total daily energy expenditure) calculator, such as the one at tdeecalculator.net . Remember that any calculated number is just a rough estimate , and you’ll ultimately know if it’s accurate by observing what happens to your weight when you consume that amount of calories.

If you use a fitness tracker or other device that estimates your daily calorie burn, that’s also a good starting point. Just remember that this is also an estimate and may vary by several hundred calories .

How do you know how many calories a product contains?

The easiest way to find out the calorie content of a food is to look at its nutrition label. Or, if the food doesn’t have a nutrition label, search for the food name plus “calories,” paying attention to the serving size and source of the information. For example, when I Google “apple calories,” I get a result stating that a medium apple, about 7.5 cm in diameter, contains 95 calories. The source is the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), which maintains a database of common foods. Here’s the entry for apples . By default, it shows a 100-gram serving, but you can change the “serving” drop-down menu to display a medium apple.

Restaurants sometimes list the calorie count next to each dish. If not, check the restaurant’s website or search for the restaurant’s name and add “nutrition information.” Often, you’ll find a PDF file on their website with the calorie count, as well as other information such as protein and carbohydrate content. However, there’s an easier way to track calories: using a calorie-counting app.

What is the best calorie tracking app?

There are plenty of good (or at least not terrible) calorie tracking apps out there. My pick is Cronometer : the free version has all the essential features, and it’s not tied to specific goals, so you can use it whether you’re trying to gain weight, lose weight, or neither.

MyFitnessPal is probably the most popular calorie tracking app, which is surprising, as it’s easily the worst out there. Calorie information is often inaccurate, the interface overly promotes weight loss, whether you’re interested in it or not, and basic features like a barcode scanner are only available in the paid version. Here’s a selection of MyFitnessPal alternatives .

When using a calorie tracking app, you’ll search for foods you’ve just eaten (or are about to eat). This can be a bit cumbersome at first: you’ll have to select the desired food from a database and then try to determine the portion size you ate. Packaged foods are the easiest to track, which can be challenging if you’re also trying to eat more whole or homemade foods. However, remember: habits are skills , and as you develop all these mini-skills that make up calorie tracking, the habit becomes natural.

How good are AI apps at tracking calories?

Many fitness apps now include AI-powered calorie tracking. You often take a photo of your food, and the AI ​​identifies it and calculates the calorie count. These apps aren’t highly accurate, but they’re still better than guessing.

If you need accurate data, it’s worth learning how to properly track your food intake. Learn to measure portion sizes and create recipes using your own ingredients, which I’ll cover below. Get used to looking at the numbers on food labels. AI apps will become much more accurate when you can provide this additional information and recognize errors in the numbers. For example, if the AI ​​shows a snack as 600 calories when it actually has 300, an experienced user who knows how to track their food intake will immediately realize something is wrong. This experience will also help you choose similar foods when the AI ​​can’t find an exact match in the database.

How to choose the right serving size for a tracked product?

As you gain experience, you’ll learn to estimate portion sizes fairly accurately by eye. But while you’re getting used to it, make it a habit to measure or weigh foods whenever possible. For example, I can now fairly accurately estimate the difference between a cup of rice and a half-cup of rice by eye. I know that a three-ounce serving of meat is about the size of a deck of cards, or a little smaller than the palm of your hand (depending, I suppose, on the size of your hand). A “serving” of peanut butter is two tablespoons; measure this at least once to get a sense of whether it’s more or less than your typical serving.

To be more precise, you can start using a kitchen scale . This will make your life much easier. For example, you’ll be able to:

• Place the toast on the scale, zero it out, and then spread some peanut butter on it. Weigh the toast with peanut butter on it, and you’ll know exactly how many grams of peanut butter you used.

• Measure out the required amount of chicken, vegetables, or any other food you plan to eat.

• Divide the dish into equal portions by weighing the whole dish and then weighing each portion to contain ¼ of the total amount (if you are preparing a dish for four servings).

• Place a container of yogurt, for example, on the scale and zero it. Then, you can transfer the yogurt from the container to the blender while you’re making the smoothie. This requires the “negative tare” feature, which is great for adding ingredients to containers that can’t be weighed directly, such as a blender or a stovetop pot. Simply weigh the container you’re adding the ingredients from .

How to correctly count calories in home-cooked food?

Your calorie tracking app should have a recipe creation feature. Add ingredients and be sure to indicate how many servings the recipe makes if you’re cooking for a large group or making multiple servings for meal prep . Be sure to list all ingredients, including vegetable oil and seasonings.

How do you count calories in a meal prepared by someone else?

If you’re unsure of the exact ingredients in a dish, you can guess. The easiest way is to search online for a similar dish at a restaurant and estimate the portion size by eye. Grandma’s spaghetti and meatballs might not be exactly the same as Olive Garden’s, but they’re probably close enough.

What should I do if my food has oil or sauce in it and I don’t finish it?

Unfortunately, there’s no easy way to adjust for this. You might be eating a lot of calories, but mathematically separating them from the rest of the ingredients you ate would be difficult. In this case, I simply pretend I ate the whole thing, including the sauce. If there’s a lot of sauce, and I’m sure I ate a lot of calories, I’ll record it as 0.9 instead of one serving.

Do I need to track everything every day?

Thank goodness there are no food police, so no, you don’t have to do anything. But if you’re trying to get a roughly accurate estimate of your daily calorie intake, you really should record as much as possible. If you snack on cookies, log those cookies in your app.

Sometimes I’ll skip a whole day of tracking but not record a partial day. If I ate 1,200 calories before dinner and then went to a party and ate 15 different little things that I can’t accurately track, I might say “screw it” and delete the entire day. But I won’t keep 1,200, because looking back, it will seem like the whole day was only 1,200 calories. If I know I ate more than usual and want to make sure my records reflect it, I’ll choose a temporary option, like a restaurant meal (one of my apps, Macrofactor , has an entry for “Thanksgiving”), and record anything that brings me to, say, 3,000 calories.

Similarly, it’s tempting to avoid recording what you think you “shouldn’t” eat, but this is counterproductive. In reality, if I consume 2,500 calories and only record 2,000, I’ll look at the app and think, “Wow, I’m eating 2,000 calories and not losing weight.” I’ll start to feel like I need to eat even less than 2,000, and I can get into one of those vicious cycles where I restrict myself to smaller portions of food and then find myself eating even more “forbidden” foods that aren’t tracked. This is an unhealthy way of eating , and it tends to get worse over time. Instead, I record everything. If I know I’m consuming 2,500 calories and not losing weight, I can appreciate the fact that my body can effectively use those 2,500 calories each day. Then I’ll eat a little less – maybe 2200 – and see if that can be a more effective and sustainable approach.

Or, in other words: if you write everything down, you can be honest with yourself (and kinder to yourself). You just need to view the numbers as neutral data, not as an assessment of whether you’re doing “well” or not.

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