Best Diet Software?

• Works with Any Diet...or No Diet
• Used by Millions
• Download it FREE

Finding the Best Food Calorie Counter

A calorie counter is an indispensable tool for losing weight, since it measures the most important factor in attaining your goal. But not every calorie counter is easy to use. Some aren't terribly accurate, either.

Here's what veteran calorie watchers say you should look for:

A Big Food Calorie Counter

The average supermarket features more than 30,000 foods. Choose a food calorie counter that contains at least 20,000 items and lets you add more by keying in nutrition facts from labels.

A Quick Food Calorie Counter

On a typical day, you'll eat 20 to 40 different foods. Find a counter that can locate a food in less than one second. Avoid counters that expect you to drill down through categories and subcategories to find the item you want. Instead of looking up foods online (where you'll have to wait for data to pass back and forth to your computer), choose a program you can install on your own hard drive. (Most of these can be downloaded from the Web.) Pick one that remembers your favorites. And make sure you can test it for free.

A Smart Calorie Counter

Besides revealing the number of calories in each food you look up, a smart calorie counter keeps track of all the calories you eat and compares these to the number you need for meeting your goal.

Smart calorie counters don't make mistakes. Avoid online counters that let other users contribute foods to their databases. This practice may give the website an opportunity to brag about the number of foods it covers, but thousands of these are likely to be duplicates—and many will probably report their calorie content incorrectly.

A Versatile Food Calorie Counter

Since you'll be looking up every food you eat anyway, it's wise to pick a food calorie counter that simultaneously monitors your intake of other nutrients. Especially important are sodium; calcium; saturated, monounsaturated, and trans fats; folic acid (AKA folate); and vitamins A, C, and E.

A Guaranteed Calorie Counter

You may use a calorie counter for several weeks or months, only to find another one you like better. Choose a calorie counter with the longest money-back guarantee you can find, and make sure the company doesn't have a reputation for making customers jump through hoops to get refunds.

One food calorie counter offers a 12-month, no-questions-asked refund policy. Called DietPower®, it not only counts calories, but watches 32 other nutrients in 21,000 foods and recipes. It also adjusts your calorie budget to fluctuations in your metabolism and awards extra calories for exercise.