Nutrition Health Center

An Expert’s Guide to Free Calorie Counters

By Terry Dunkle*

As an inventor of one of the first free calorie counters (1992), I’ve seen lots of them come and go. Today, you can find hundreds on the Web. Although they’re free, that tends to be misleading: you can waste a lot of valuable time trying to use the bad ones -- so much that you may decide to pay the $20 to $40 that a really good one costs.

Here, from someone who’s seen most of them, is what separates the good from the bad.

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Database Integrity

The best free calorie counters include at least 20,000 foods and at least 20 nutrients in each food. The database is updated regularly. If it’s online and accepts contributions from users keying in nutrition facts from food labels, the contributions are checked to prevent errors and needless duplication. Besides logging foods from the database, the counter lets you keep a personal database of foods that you especially like or frequently eat.

Completeness

Good free calorie counters do more than let you look up calorie counts and add them up by hand. The best keep a running tally for you. They calculate a daily calorie budget designed to take you to your goal weight on your target date. They continually show you how many calories remain in your budget today. They deposit uneaten calories in a “bank” so you can eat them tomorrow. They automatically award you extra calories for exercise. And they show you not only your calorie balance, but your balance of many other nutrients important in heart disease, cancer, diabetes, pregnancy, and other health concerns.

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™.

Ease

Free calorie counters that occupy you more than five to ten minutes a day are wasting your time. To prevent this, take a test drive for a few days. Using the program should become second nature within a week.

Intelligence

A few programs (mine included) “learn” your favorite foods and other facts that help them give you unusually personalized advice. DietPower monitors your personal metabolism and tweaks your budget daily to ensure that you reach your goal. It also recommends foods you like that are best for your nutrient balance right now. You may find sophisticated functions in free calorie counters as well -- the point is that you need to examine many to find the few that are “smartest.”

Help

Especially when a program has a lot of built-in intelligence, you may frequently have questions you want to ask a tech support specialist. Unfortunately, tech support for most programs is notoriously weak. Check for a live-operator phone number on their website, and ask how promptly they answer emails. (DietPower offers free email and 800-number phone support from 9 a.m. to midnight Eastern, 365 days a year. You might use this as a standard for comparison.)

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