Nutrition Health Center

Best Free Online Calorie Counter

By Terry Dunkle*

It’s easy to find a free online calorie counter these days, but difficult to find one that provides all of the features described below:

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Large Food Database

Steer clear of any calorie counter that doesn’t cover at least 20,000 foods. That’s actually 10,000 lower than the number of items in a typical supermarket.

Make sure the calorie counter also lets you add your own foods to a personal database, by keying in nutrition facts from the labels. But don’t trust a database that mingles foods added by other people with those you add yourself. User contributions are notoriously inaccurate.

Large Exercise Database

A topnotch free online calorie counter will include at least 500 kinds of exercise, which you can log to earn extra calories. It should take your weight into account when calculating the number of calories you’ve earned, because a heavier person normally burns more calories performing the same exercise that a lighter person performs.

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™.

Intelligent Calorie Budget

A typical calorie counter will calculate a calorie budget for reaching your goal weight on your target date. Most base this calculation on an average person’s metabolism, but a few actually monitor your own metabolism (which may depart from the average by as much as 30 percent) and continually adjust your budget accordingly. These can actually guarantee reaching your goal on schedule.

Ease of Use

Don’t use a calorie counter that takes more than seven to ten minutes a day to log your foods. The best calorie counters can do this in five minutes or less. Test-drive the program for a few days to see how well it performs.

Nutrient Monitoring

Since you’re logging your foods anyway, it pays to choose a free online calorie counter that also watches your intake of nutrients other than calories. The best programs monitor dozens of nutrients important in preventing or treating diabetes, heart disease, osteoporosis, stroke, cancer, and other nutrition-related problems. Some report your intake of each nutrient not only for the current day, but for the past week, month, quarter, and year.

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