Nutrition Health Center

Finding the Best Calorie Count for Food

By Terry Dunkle*

Here are the five most important factors when looking for a good calorie counter for food:

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Diary Approach

The best calorie counter is the one that acts like a diary: You log your foods and exercises each day, and the program automatically tallies your calorie intake and expenditures and compares your net intake with a calorie budget that it has calculated for reaching your goal weight on your target date. If any calories remain uneaten, at the end of the day, it deposits these in a “bank” so you can eat them later. Besides calories, the program also monitors your intake of many other nutrients -- saturated fat; calcium; cholesterol; vitamins A, C, and E; folic acid, and others important in preventing or treating heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and other nutrition-related maladies..

Food Selection

Avoid any calorie counter for food that covers fewer than 20,000 foods. (That may seem like a lot, but it’s only two-thirds as many as in a modern supermarket.) Make sure it doesn’t inflate its numbers by listing duplicates under different names. It should also let you add your own foods by providing nutrition facts from labels. (If it’s an online calorie counter, it shouldn’t let other users add foods, however, as this puts you at the mercy of their typing mistakes.)

Based on 20 years of research by DietPower, Inc., this calculator is accurate to 5 percent for most users. (It's not for people who are pregnant or have metabolic disorders. Always see a doctor before starting a diet.)

Birth Date

Sex

Tobacco user?

Height

Weight

Goal Weight

Target Date

Email Address

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ft. in.

lbs.

lbs. ?

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Close Goal Weight
Your Goal Weight is the weight you want to achieve. (If it's a lot different from your current weight, you might want to set a goal that represents only the first step. Even a 10-percent weight loss will significantly improve your health.)
Close Target Date
Plan on losing no more than a pound or two per week.  Otherwise, you may eat too little for good nutrition and your weight loss may be temporary.
Close Lactating?
If you are breastfeeding, check this box and the calculator will add calories for producing milk.
Close Tobacco User?
Nicotine speeds your metabolism, making you burn calories faster. (That's why people who quit smoking gain weight.) Check this box if you average more than one cigarette, one-half pipeful, one-quarter of a cigar, or one dip of snuff or chewing tobacco per day.
Close Email Address
Once a month, DietPower will send you the most important nutrition news of the past 30 days, selected by national award-winning editors covering hundreds of medical journals. You can cancel this free, no-obligation service anytime with a single click. We produce it only to promote our weight-loss software. It won't put you on other mailing lists—We're Not That Kind of Company™.

Exercise Selection

A good calorie counter also lets you log your exercise to earn additional calorie for eating. Look for one that covers at least 500 kinds of exercise, ranging from sport and leisure pursuits to household and occupational activities. Make sure it factors your calorie “burn” for your current weight (heavier people burn more calories than lighter people do).

“Smart” Functions

Rarely, you can find a calorie counter for food that performs much more sophisticated functions than those described above. DietPower, for example (advertised on this page), actually monitors your personal metabolic rate and adjusts your daily budget accordingly, to guarantee reaching your goal on your deadline. It also shows which of your favorite foods will do the most for your Nutrition Quotient™ if eaten now. A few other programs have similarly advanced functions; they are well worth looking for.

Support

Don’t buy or use a calorie counter for food that doesn’t offer free phone and email support across a broad range of hours. You’ll be looking up and logging foods at all hours of the day; it’s good to have someone to give you help if you run into problems.

Founder, CEO, and Editor-in-Chief of DietPower, Inc.