Nutrition Health Center

Ways to Watch Your Food Calorie Count

By Terry Dunkle*

Nothing controls your body weight more than your food calorie count. That's why counting the calories you eat is the ultimate key to weight loss.

The question is, how can you accurately monitor your food calorie count without spending a lot of time—or an arm and a leg? This page offers tips that I've discovered in 20 years of building and studying calorie counters.

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Get a Private Food Calorie Count

I'm prejudiced, because my company's calorie counter (DietPower®) is software that installs on your own computer, rather than a service that works on the Web. Still, the arguments for using software instead of webware are strong. Software not only prevents others from peeking at your records, but also works a lot faster because it doesn't have to pass data back and forth over the Web. (The speed question is critical if you have dialup instead of broadband Web access.) Web services usually make you look at ads every time you use them, too, which some people find objectionable.

Get a Precise Food Calorie Count

A calorie count is no good if it isn't accurate. The difference between gaining 10 pounds and losing 10 pounds in a year is only 192 calories a day—the amount in two slices of lightly buttered bread.

Watch out for websites that calculate your food calorie count from a food database contributed by members. Unless the website carefully checks the nutrient data (unlikely, because the whole point of using member-contributed data is to save money), you'll be the victim of everyone else's typing errors.

Another sore point with me (because I've worked on the problem for 20 years) is budget algorithms that over- or underestimate the number of calories you need for reaching your goal weight. Compare the budget you get from your food calorie count tool with the one calculated by the tool below. If the two figures disagree by more than 100 calories, beware.

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.)

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Tobacco user?

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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™.

Get a Low-Maintenance Food Calorie Count

Look for a calorie counter that can log all your foods in less than 10 minutes a day. (Experienced DietPower users can break 5 minutes.) To accomplish this, the counter generally must remember your favorite foods, find foods by name (rather than asking you to drill down through categories), and let you log any food in any measure—metric or English, weight or volume.

A good calorie counter will also have a "dashboard" where you can instantly see the effect of any food choice on your overall nutrition and the calories remaining in your budget.

Get More than a Food Calorie Count

If you're logging all your foods anyway, it pays to get not only a food calorie count, but also a complete profile of your nutrient intake. This is especially important if you are fighting or trying to avoid heart disease, osteoporosis, diabetes, cancer, or other nutrient-sensitive diseases. For most people, the high-priority nutrients are sodium, potatssium, total fat, saturated fat, trans fat, cholesterol, calcium, folic acid, water, and alcohol.

In addition, find a program that awards you extra calories for physical activities, based on the nature of the activity and its intensity, speed, and duration.

Get a Guaranteed Food Calorie Count

With dozens of food calorie count tools on the market, you don't have to accept one that won't give your money back if you're unhappy with it. Most companies offer 30-day warranties. (DietPower offers the longest that we know of: one full year.) And choose a calorie counter that you can test-drive for a week or two before purchasing.

Product Development Chief, DietPower, Inc.