Finally, a simple and free Counting Calories For Weight Loss Calculator! This calculator has helped over 8 million people lose weight around the world. All you need to do is follow the instructions in the calculator to find out your recommended calorie intake. Then try our weight loss tips to help you along the way.
How to Calculate Food Calories
Counting calories is a useful strategy for losing weight. Since all packaged foods in the US must contain a nutrition facts label, this should be pretty easy to do. If you need to know the exact number of calories coming from fat, protein, and carbs, then you will have to do a little extra math. In cases where your food doesn’t have a label, like at a restaurant, try looking up dishes or ingredients using an online food composition database or calorie calculator. After reading this article, you might want to calculate your total daily calorie needs.
Using a Calorie Calculator or Guidebook
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Use an online calorie calculator to look up nutritional information quickly. If you have a computer or smartphone, you have many useful calorie-counting tools at your fingertips. Resources like the USDA’s Food Composition Database[9] or WebMD’s Food Calorie Calculator[10] archive the nutrition facts for virtually every food imaginable and make them easy to view with the touch of a button.
Non-packaged items, like fresh fruits and vegetables and prepared meals in restaurants, don’t give you the benefit of being able to review the relevant nutrition facts. An online calorie counter can come in handy when you want to know more about what’s in these foods.
Some calorie counters only offer the number of calories and recommended serving sizes of the foods you look up. Others may also give you their macronutrient values.
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Carry a food composition guidebook when you’re on the go. As an alternative to online tools, there are also traditional publications that document the nutritional value of common food items. Bring your guidebook with you when you eat out or go grocery shopping to get a sense of how various foods are being used in your body.
A few of the most popular food composition guides include “The Complete Book of Food Counts” by Corinne T. Netzer, “Nutritive Value of Foods,” by Susan E. Gebhardt, and the USDA’s “Handbook of the Nutritional Value of Foods in Common Units.”
Some guidebooks even report the nutritional value of menu selections at well-known restaurants. If you’re ever wanted to know how many calories are in a Bloomin’ Onion from Outback Steakhouse, now’s your chance!
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Search for a food or ingredient. Type in the name of the item or flip through your food composition guidebook until you find the correct listing. There, you’ll see the calorie count for the USDA recommended serving size, along with other info like the values of the major macronutrients and recommended daily values (DV).
Be sure to specify the exact serving size of the item you’re researching. Serving sizes are most often measured in cups, ounces, or grams.
The items in a food composition guide may be listed alphabetically or grouped into sections by category (such as fruits, vegetables, meats, bread products, or snack foods).
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Look up ingredients for homemade meals separately. If you’re curious about how many calories are in an entire meal, it will be necessary to record each ingredient individually. You’ll then add together the values according to the specific amount used in the dish. Grab a pen and piece of paper so you can write down each value as you go along-this will make it much easier to total them later.
To find out approximately how many calories are in a bowl of homemade beef stew, for example, you would need to refer to the listings for beef, potatoes, carrots, onions, and broth or stock, then figure out the number of calories found in the amounts that the recipe calls for.
Don’t forget to include ingredients like butter, oil, shortening, and bread crumbs. These are often left out of calculations because they’re not thought of as main components of the dish.
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Consider the nutritional distinctions between similar foods. Scan the listings carefully and highlight the one that most closely matches the item you’re curious about. A chicken breast cooked with the skin on, for example, will be higher in fat and calories than a skinless one. Looking at the wrong item could give you an inaccurate impression of how healthy your food choices are.
Foods like fruits, vegetables, meats, nuts, and cheeses in particular come in a wide array. There are over 200 common varieties of potatoes sold in the US alone!
Variety is common even among packaged food items. In some cases there may be 3-4 different kinds of the same product, including low-fat, high-protein, and whole grain variations.
How to Convert Calories Burned Into Pounds Lost
Your caloric intake is the most important factor in determining your weight. It comes down to how many calories you consume versus how many you burn. Both exercise and diet influence how effectively you burn calories. Whether your goal is to lose, gain or maintain weight, there is a method to calculate your daily calorie requirements. You will need to know your current level of physical activity, height and weight to use the equation.
1.
Weigh yourself. Use a bathroom scale to determine your weight in pounds. A scale usually gives your weight in stones.
2.
Calculate your basic metabolic rate (BMR). Your BMR is your resting metabolic rate, which is how active your metabolism is when you are not performing any physical activity, such as sleep. If you’re a woman, use the following formula to calculate your BMR: 655 + (4.35 x weight in pounds) + (4.7 x height in inches) – (4.7 x age in years).
Use the following formula to calculate your BMR if you are a man: 66 + (6.23 x weight in pounds) + (12.7 x height in inches) – (6.8 x age in years). For example, a 23-year-old man who is 6 feet 2 inches tall, weighing 185 pounds, has a basic metabolic rate of 2,003.
3.
Multiply your BMR by the level of physical activity you get. If you get little or no exercise, times your BMR by 1.2 and if you perform light exercise, such as walking one to three days a week, multiply your BMR by 1.375. For a moderate level of exercise, such as jogging three to five times a week, multiply your BMR by 1.55. And for those who are very active and exercise or engage in sports most days of the week, times your BMR by 1.725. Calculate an athletic level of exercise by multiplying your BMR by 1.9. The result is the ideal number of calories you should consume daily. The very active 23-year-old man in the example above would multiply his BMR by 1.725, for a total of 3,452 calories daily.
4.
Increase your ideal number of calories by 500 to 1,000 daily to increase your weight by 1 to 2 pounds a week, or decrease your calories if you want to lose weight.
How do you calculate calories needed to lose weight?
If you’re about to embark on your weight loss journey then you need to understand the most important component for weight loss – creating an energy deficit. This article covers some of the factors that contribute to creating an energy deficit, how to estimate your energy deficit and some top tips for creating an energy deficit successfully!
How to estimate a calorie deficit for weight loss
If you have already been tracking your energy intake for a while, then you may be familiar with your caloric intake and therefore you can simply make a daily caloric deduction from that.
1. Use an online calculator and enter your stats to get an estimation of your caloric intake and a guideline for your intake for weight loss: https://legionathletics.com/tools/tdee-calculator/
2. Multiply your bodyweight in pounds by 10-12: opt for the lower end if you’re less active and the higher end if you’re more active.
3. Track your food and record weight for 2 weeks: record your caloric intake for 2 weeks, as well as recording your weight three times per week. If you find that over the 2 weeks your weight has stayed the same based on that caloric intake, then you can reduce your food intake by a certain proportion depending upon your weight loss target.
It is important to note that all of the above methods are estimations and option 1 and 2 are likely to be need to be adjusted based on you as an individual. Definitely use the caloric values as a tool that you combine with your understanding of what you currently eat and what is happening to your weight in order to be able to create a caloric deficit that is more appropriate for you.
Additionally, be aware that this number for your caloric deficit will need to be adjusted as you lose weight!
Also be aware that the more overweight you are, the less accurate these predictions are. Because fat tissue is less metabolically active than say muscle tissue, the chances are the predictions overestimate your resting and predicted total energy expenditure. To help overcome this, sometimes it can be a good idea to calculate your requirements based upon what you should be rather than what you are.
In clinic, we use Body Composition Testing, to not only calculate our clients body composition but to also establish predicted resting energy expenditure and also daily total energy expenditure. This then guides our clinicians in establishing appropriate caloric requirements.
Calorie Intake in Standard Diets
The Food and Drug Administration usually lists 2,000 calories as the appropriate amount people should consume on a daily basis. Nutrition facts labels typically use this amount as the basis for the percentage of nutritional values they list.
However, the Dietary Guidelines for Americans states that the exact amount of calories people should consume is based on various factors – particularly age, sex and amount of physical activity.
If you’re trying to find out your recommended calorie intake for weight loss, you first need to determine the appropriate amount of calories you should be consuming per day. The first step is to identify your lifestyle, keeping in mind that most people’s lifestyles can be classified as either sedentary, moderately active or active.
Calorie Intake for Sedentary Adults
Sedentary adult males need between 2,400 and 2,600 calories a day between the ages of 18 and 40, according to the Dietary Guidelines for Americans. As they get older, they require less calories. Between ages 41 and 60, they require around 2,200 calories per day and just 2,000 calories per day from age 61 onward.
Sedentary adult women require less than their male counterparts. They typically need 1,800 calories per day, but between the ages of 19 and 25 should consume 2,000 calories per day. Like men, they need fewer calories as they get older – a total of 1,600 calories per day after age 51.
Calorie Intake Based on Activity
The Dietary Guidelines for Americans recommends that people who are physically active consume more calories than those who are sedentary. For both moderately active adult females and males, this means an additional 200 to 400 calories per day. For active adult females and males, this means an additional 400 to 800 calories per day.
The number of additional calories you should consume is based on your level of activity. Olympians have been known to consume as much as 8,000 to 12,000 calories per day when training, which is far more than the Dietary Guidelines for Americans recommends. However, unless your job requires rigorous physical activity each day, chances are your lifestyle is moderately active or active.