Nutrition Health Center

Finding a Good Calories Counters

By Terry Dunkle*

One of the best tools you can use for weight loss is a calories counter. It measures the most important factor in your weight: the amount of energy in your food. As smart dieters know, if you don't burn off all the energy you take in, your body has no choice but to store the remainder as fat.

It's easy to find such tools, but only a few are accurate, quick, and easy to use. Here's what to look for:

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A Precise Calories Counters

Make sure your Calories Counters is based on the latest update (Release 21) of the USDA Nutrient Database for Standard Reference, which analyzes 10,000 popular American foods. Avoid those that present user-volunteered data, often solicited by companies hoping to inflate their food databases. Don't put yourself at the mercy of everyone else's typing errors.

Does Your Calories Counters Agree?

Below is a tool that accurately calculates a calorie budget for your current weight, goal weight, and target date. If your counter doesn't yield a similar budget (within 100 calories or so), consider it unreliable.

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™.

A Private Calories Counters

Online calorie counters usually ask for your email address, and sometimes for other facts as well. This can trigger spam from companies that buy the information. Worst-case, the website may surreptitiously peek into your address book and send spam to all of your friends.

For this reason, many dieters prefer to use a Calories Counters that installs on their own computer and keeps all of their information there instead of transmitting it to the Web.

An Easy Calories Counters

Counting calories can be discouragingly time-consuming if you don't choose a tool that reduces the steps to an absolute minimum. The speediest Calories Counterss remember your favorite foods and provide buttons for quickly factoring your serving size. They never make you drill down from category to subcategory to find a food—they search by food name, and they know synonyms and even recognize misspellings.

A Calories Counters that Does More

Why count only calories when, in the same amount of time, you can also watch your intake of other nutrients? A truly useful Calories Counters will also count fat grams, carbohydrates, vitamins, minerals, and water. It will also give you extra calories for logging exercise.

One leading Calories Counters, DietPower®, tracks 33 nutrients and guarantees reaching your goal weight on your target date by monitoring changes in your metabolism. It also allows for fluctuations in sodium intake, exercise at high temperatures, and many other factors.

Veteran medical editor, CEO of DietPower, Inc.