Calorie tracking is pretty easy once youve gotten the hang of it, but getting started can be confusing.
What are calories and why do people count them?
Calories are a measure of energy.
The more exercise you do, for example, the more calories you gotta fuel that activity.
Everything you eat has a calorie number attached to it (whether its on a label or not).
In general, we eat about the same number of calories we burn.
How do I know how many calories I should eat?
That number varies from person to person.
A 49, 100-pound woman who only does light exercise might burn 1,440 calories per day.
A six-foot, 280-pound man who does heavy workouts twice a day might burn 4,309.
Most of us are somewhere in between, in the 2,000 to 3,000 calorie range.
Idiscuss calorie burn a little more here.
(The average for adults was, years ago,calculated to be 2,350.
So if you would like to lose weight, youll want to eat slightly less than you burn.
Do the opposite if youre trying to gain.
Now that you understand the logic, you just need a starting estimate of how many calories you burn.
Otherwise, plug your information into a TDEE (total daily energy expenditure) calulator like the one attdeecalculator.net.
Just remember that this isalsoan estimate, andcould still be off by a few hundred calories in either direction.
How do I find out how many calories are in a food?
The easiest way to get a calorie number for a food is to look at its label.
When youre eating at a restaurant, calorie counts are sometimes shown next to each food item.
If they arent, check the restaurants website, or search the restaurants name plus nutrition information.
What is the best calorie tracking app?
The mostpopularcalorie tracking app is probably MyFitnessPal, which is baffling because its easily the worst one out there.
We havea roundup of alternatives to MyFitnessPal here.
How do I select an accurate serving size for the food Im tracking?
As you gain more practice, youll get pretty good at eyeballing serving sizes.
To be more precise, you canstart using a food scale.
This makes your life easier in so many ways.
Weigh the peanut-buttered toast, and youll know exactly how many grams of peanut butter you used.
Weigh out your desired portion of chicken, vegetables, or anything else youre eating.
Place a container of, say, yogurt on the scale, and zero it.
Then you could scoop yogurt from that container into the blender as youre making a smoothie.
You just weigh the container the food is comingfrom.
How do I count the calories in homemade food?
Your calorie tracking app should have a way of creating a recipe.
verify to include all the ingredients, including cooking oil and condiments.
How do I count calories in a meal somebody else made?
If you dont know exactly whats in something, you could guess.
The easiest way is to look up a restaurant food that is similar and eyeball the portion.
Unfortunately theres no easy adjustment to make here.
In this case I just pretend I ate the whole thing, sauce and all.
Do I need to track everything, every day?
There are no food-tracking police (thank god), so no, you donthaveto do anything.
If you snack on a cookie, put a cookie into your app.
Ill sometimes skip an entire day of tracking, but I wont log a partial day.
Instead, I log it all.
I would then eat slightly lessmaybe 2,200and see if that might be a more effective and sustainable approach.
