Best Diet Software?

Nutrition Health Center

Finding a Good Calorie Counter Chart

By Terry Dunkle*

If you’re dieting, it’s smart to use a calorie counter chart to make sure you’re eating the right amount of food. Otherwise, you won’t reach your goal weight on your target date.

In recent years, old-fashioned paper charts have been supplanted by counters published online or installed on your PC. Here are five considerations when you’re looking for a good one:

Foods

A truly useful calorie counter chart will have 20,000 or more distinct foods in its database (not duplicates under different names). Look a chart that lets you add your own foods by adding data from food labels. Be skeptical, though, if you’re considering an online counter that lets other people add foods to it. Such tools are usually riddled with errors and duplicates. (Some make an effort to weed these out. Ask.)

Exercises

Every good weight-loss plan includes exercise, and the exercise you perform burns off calories that allow you extra eating. Your chart should take this into account. It should also factor your calorie burn for your current weight. Some (such as DietPower, advertised on this page) also let you specify the speed or intensity of your workout. Whichever you choose, make sure it covers at least 500 forms of exercise or lets you add your own by entering calorie-burn data from websites, books, or exercise-machine readouts.

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

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™.

Diary

Besides showing you the number of calories in foods and exercise, a good calorie counter chart will have a diary attached. The diary shows you how many calories remain in your budget as you log your foods and exercises. It should also deposit uneaten calories in a “bank” in case you want to eat them tomorrow.

Intelligence

It’s possible to find a calorie counter chart that performs even more sophisticated functions than those described above. DietPower, for example, “learns” your personal metabolism and adjusts your daily budget to guarantee reaching your goal on your target date. It also monitors 33 nutrients that figure in heart disease, diabetes, osteoporosis, and other maladies, and recommends foods you like that are best for your overall nutrition.

Warranties

Don’t buy a calorie counter chart that doesn’t offer a free “test drive” or a no-hassle money-back guarantee. You don’t want to be stuck paying for one that is too difficult to use or doesn’t give reliable information.

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

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