Nutrition Health Center

Calorie Counter Foods Guide

By Terry Dunkle*

A calorie counter foods guide is vital to helping you eat the right amount to reach your goal weight on schedule. The best guides today are available either a) on the Web or b) as software that you can download from the Web and install on your own computer. Before buying or using any of these, see how it measures up in these five important details:

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Food Database Quality

Choose a calorie counter foods guide that has data on at least 20,000 foods. Be careful to exclude any guide that overstates its numbers by including duplicate foods under different names. Watch out, too, for guides that acquire their food data by letting users volunteer it from food labels. Guides like these are often laced with errors and duplication.

Exercise Database Quality

Similarly, your guide should include an exercise database with at least 500 different activities. By logging these, you will be able to earn extra calories for eating. The best guides let you specify not only how long you performed an exercise, but how rapidly or intensely, because these significantly affect the number of calories they burn.

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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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™.

Journaling Functions

Your guide should tie the databases together into a journal that automatically keeps track of your calorie “spending” and balance, so you don’t have to do this by hand. Many calorie counter food guides also track your intake of dozens of nutrients. A few (such as DietPower, advertised on this page) can show you which foods provided which nutrients, monitor you water intake, and perform similarly sophisticated analysis.

Personalization

If you look carefully, you can find a calorie counter foods guide that “learns” your metabolism and tweaks your budget daily to keep you moving smoothly toward your goal. One (DietPower) even recommends foods you like that are best for your overall nutrition. Others may surprise you with capabilities that exactly match what you’re looking for. The point is that you should examine many before settling on one.

Company Attitude

Shun any company that won’t let you try their calorie counter foods guide free or get your money back if the guide doesn’t fully satisfy you. A reasonable trial period is it two weeks (with the complete program, not a dumbed-down version). Companies that offer a money-back guarantee usually limit it to 30 days, but some are more generous. (DietPower offers a full year.)

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