Calorie Counting 101
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Calorie Counting 101
With the crazy amount of "I'm eating 1200 calories and I'm not losing weight" or "My weight loss has stalled" threads that get posted every day I decided to copy a calorie counting sticky I wrote for another forum. This is a guide to help ensure as much accuracy as possible when counting calories. It may seem OCD to some but for beginners I feel the more accurate they can be, the better. Before you post about how you can't count calories because of an ED, this thread isn't for you. If you have psychological issues with counting calories, simply don't. This thread is to help those who want to use calorie counting as a means to lose weight. It is based on the fact that if you eat less calories then you burn in a day you will lose weight. If you do not believe in this fact then please just don't post here. This thread is also not about how much you should eat and what you should eat. It is simply about how to accurately track what you do eat. Please keep the reply's to things that deal with calorie counting. If you want to talk about any of the aforementioned things, start a new thread.
Logging foods: In the old days, to calorie count, we had to use paper and pencil. This is why programs like weight watchers became so popular. It essentially dumbed down calorie counting to a point system and made things easier to track. With the advent of software like Myfitnesspal, there is no need for the dumbing down. You can track calories, macro nutrients, micro nutrients, and exercise with very little hassle.
To correctly implement calorie counting you must log everything you consume in a day that contains calories. This includes liquids and/or supplements that contain calories. Some people also log calorie free foods (gum, diet soda, black coffee, etc). Since they do not contain any calories, this is optional. They may however contain something that you want to track (vitamins, minerals, sodium).
Weighing foods: You must weigh your foods! Do not estimate! Weigh everything on a kitchen scale. Preferably a digital scale that weighs in grams. Only liquids should be measured by volume (cups tablespoons, etc). On a package of oatmeal the label will usually say that a serving size is ½ cup. It will also have 40g in parentheses. Use a scale to weigh out 40 grams. You will find that if you dump oats into a ½ cup measuring cup that it won’t always equal 40 grams. This becomes more important with calorically dense food such as peanut butter. 1 tablespoon is usually 100 calories, however one can easily put 2-3 “tablespoons” worth of peanut butter on the end of a normal kitchen spoon. Instead weigh the peanut butter according to how many grams are in a serving. The same goes for scoopers found in supplements. One scoop of whey does not always equal 1 serving. Always weigh your whey! Here are some links to a couple of kitchen scales for purchase:
http://www.amazon.com/EatSmart-Precision-Digital-Kitchen-Silver/dp/B001N07KUE/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&qid=1391480839&sr=8-5&keywords=eatsmart+scale
http://www.amazon.com/Ozeri-Digital-Multifunction-Kitchen-Elegant/dp/B004164SRA/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1391480816&sr=8-1&keywords=food+scale
[b[Handling foods with no nutritional information[/b]: Sometimes fruits, vegetables, and meats do not come with nutritional information. The USDA has a comprehensive list of nearly all fruits, vegetables, and many different cuts of meats in grams.
http://ndb.nal.usda.gov/ndb/search/list
Using myfitnesspal you can simply search the fruit, vegetable, or meat with “usda” afterwards to obtain the same nutritional information. When weighing meat, ALWAYS WEIGH IT RAW. The nutritional facts are based on the raw weight of meat unless packaging specifically states otherwise. This is true for just about any food you cook. If you are simply searching the database for a food with no nutritional information, be wise at what you pick. Don't pick the one option that is significantly lower in calories then all the others simply because it is. You must also be careful with the bar code scanner. Sometimes the scanner will not give you the correct product. Verify this whenever possible.
Dining out: When dining out, attempt to find nutritional information on the restaurant you are at. Many larger chains have all that information available. Know that this is somewhat of an estimate as they are not weighing things to the gram in the kitchen. They also might be liberal with ingredients like butter and oil which can add up quickly. If the restaurant does not provide nutritional information for their meals, attempt to deconstruct your meal and track it piece by piece. If you want to be 100% accurate you can bring a scale to a restaurant. This not something I do as I don't often eat out, but depending on how accurate you wish to be, it is an option. It's worth considering if you eat out frequently.
Accuracy: Accept the fact that you will never be 100% accurate. The FDA allows for up to a 20% margin of error with nutritional information. You must simply do the best you can possibly do to not let that margin grow any larger by estimating what you have eaten. Along these lines you will find products that claim to be zero calories like mustard, cooking spray, and many others. They actually have somewhere between 0-5 calories per serving. Because of rounding they can claim zero on the label. If you want to be precise, count them as 5 calories a serving. This is increasingly important if you consume these products frequently.
Once you have a solid idea of what your daily/weekly consumption is like, it is easy to manipulate calories to fulfill whatever your goals may be. Before you decide that you need to increase or decrease calories to help accomplish goals, ask yourself “Am I tracking everything correctly?” Are you drinking something with calories and not counting it? Are you weighing everything to the gram? Are you having cheat days/meals that you are not tracking? If you answer yes to any of these then your caloric goals may be correct, you are simply not meeting them. Know that if you eat 1500 calories a day and have a once a week cheat day of 3000 calories you are effectively eating 1714 calories a day. This is why you need to track your cheat days. It's okay to have them but if you track them, you can prevent them from skewing your results.
Tips:Here are some tips that I personally like to use in my own tracking of calories:
When weighing condiments I zero the scale with the container sitting on the scale. I apply the condiments to my food. I then put the container back on the scale. It will read a negative number in grams. That is how much condiment I used. This does not work for aerosols like pam or whip cream.
If my goal is weight loss and am going out to eat at a restaurant with no nutritional information, I reconstruct the meal in myfitnesspal and add 10% to the caloric total. This is in case I underestimated. Research shows humans are notorious at underestimating what they eat. In the rare case I overestimated the calories contained in the meal, I can enjoy a small extra deficit for the day. Even if they do provide nutritional information, this might be worth doing. Again, the chef is going to exercise portion control but he isn't weight his butter or your steak on a food scale and tracking to the gram.
Myfitnesspal lets you enter in your own foods. If something is not in their database you can add it. I get my burritos from Chipotle the same way every time. They have all their nutritional information listed on their website. After I determine the values of my burrito I create the food in MFP and don’t have to bother with it next time. The same goes for Subway.
If you want to weigh liquids, this site will help you based on what liquid you are weighing http://www.convert-me.com/en/convert/cooking/
Final thoughts: Counting calories is in my opinion the best thing one can do to help lose weight. This guide was written to help you be as close to 100% accurate as possible. Some of you might not like the idea of bringing a food scale to a restaurant or weighing condiments. These things aren't musts. If you don’t want to do them then you must accept that you will be less accurate than if you had. If you are a bodybuilder preparing for a competition then you will want to be as accurate as humanly possible. If you are just trying to lose weight with no real deadlines and don’t mind if your diet takes a few weeks longer than planned, feel free to be a little less strict. If you find you are not losing weight despite the fact that your caloric intake is low enough that you should be, then you need to start considering doing things like weighing condiments. Only then can you be truly sure it is time to lower calories. I hope this guide helps you guys. Feel free to add your own tips and ask questions! Again, don't turn this into a debate about anything, that isn't the intention of this thread. Make sure your reply's are about calorie counting!
How do we know if we have the right "net calorie" number? If anything throughout the day I am usually low in my calories; I rarely eat what is required but I am still not losing weight; I talked to a personal trainer about it and she said that it's because I'm not taking in enough calories in the day so my body stores all of it as fat; I wanted your opinion on this and also what I should do about it to actually start losing weight. Do you think "my fitness pal" is accurate when calculating the unlimited goals with the amount of calories? T.I.A
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If I weigh everything else, I find no reason not to weigh vegetables. Is 80 calories of broccoli any different than an 80 calorie apple or 80 calories worth of nuts, etc.Marianne802 wrote: »What about tracking vegetables (greens)? I liked the Weight Watchers approach where all low calorie veggies where point free. I found that this encouraged me to eat more salads/vegies as I didn’t have to bother weighing them.
I don’t know if WW had this incorporated into the points allowance. I also don’t include/eat back my exercise cals, so I figure it would balance out.
You can do that. That's how I usually do it. I weigh everything before to establish the recipe. Then weigh the final product to establish serving sizes.Marianne802 wrote: »I agree, this thread brought me back to reality. Seen it with my own results. Track and I loose weight, try to go it without tracking (thinking I’ve been doing this long enough I should now know what a portion size is) and I put weight back on.
However, I find it hard to track when building a recipe for the whole family.
Say if I am cooking a casserole, I weigh all the ingredients and put it into a pot, how do I then work out the portions.
Do I weigh the entire contents of the pot to get the grams????
If this should be asked in another post please feel free to let me know.
If you are going to take the time to weigh everything else, is it that much trouble to just weigh the vegetables too? Sure they are fairly low in calories but I eat probablly 2-300 calories in vegetables some days. Why would they count any less then 300 calories of fruit, or meat, or Twinkies, or anything...Marianne802 wrote: »What about tracking vegetables (greens)? I liked the Weight Watchers approach where all low calorie veggies where point free. I found that this encouraged me to eat more salads/vegies as I didn’t have to bother weighing them.
I don’t know if WW had this incorporated into the points allowance. I also don’t include/eat back my exercise cals, so I figure it would balance out.
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Your trainer is DEAD WRONG. What she is saying makes no sense. When you eat less then you consume your body must used stored fuel for energy (fat). In her scenario if all your calories were stored as fat, what would the body be running off of? When the body has excess calories they are stored as fat (among other things) for later use. When the body is burning more calories then you are consuming the stored energy is called upon to fuel the body. When consuming what surely should be low enough calories to put you into a deficit and you are not losing weight, it's almost always one of these two problems:sherien2015 wrote: »How do we know if we have the right "net calorie" number? If anything throughout the day I am usually low in my calories; I rarely eat what is required but I am still not losing weight; I talked to a personal trainer about it and she said that it's because I'm not taking in enough calories in the day so my body stores all of it as fat; I wanted your opinion on this and also what I should do about it to actually start losing weight. Do you think "my fitness pal" is accurate when calculating the unlimited goals with the amount of calories? T.I.A
1, You are not counting calories accurately. Between not weighing food, eating out, cheat days/meals, estimation of portion sizes, inaccurate nutritional information, etc, you are simply eating a lot more then you think you are.
2, Water retention. Eating very low calories can cause LOTS of water retention that can last for a while. In this scenario you are still losing fat, you are simply retaining water at around the same rate you are losing fat. Eventually, if you give it enough time, the water retention will correct itself. This can sometimes take a month or more.
In rare occasions an actual disease process can be the culprit but this is the exception not the rule. I would say more often then not, #1 is the reason people don't lose weight eating what they think is very low calories.
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So glad I saw this. this app is always saying am not eating enough as I never eat the calories I have burnt.livinatthegym wrote: »I agree. Calories listed anywhere cannot be taken as gospel. I'd also like to mention (and I'll keep it brief), that the same goes for calories burned. There are too many intangibles that cannot be accounted for. One of my favorite examples is form. New runners, especially those who are overweight, will often bounce while they walk/ run at speeds they are not used to. They also will often sway from side to side. An experienced runner's form will be tight with deliberate movements. The inexperienced runner with bad form (if running at the same pace) will burn more calories from their form alone. A machine or exercise expert cannot accurately assess your form during every workout. A person could do the same exercise (say running at 5mph on a 5 degree incline) every day for a week and have used varying amounts of energy. This is why I never eat back calories I burn.
Hence I thought I was going the wrong way about
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This is great! I just started weighing my food, but the condiments I never thought of! Will start doing it.0
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Don't know if anyone else has thought of this but it dawned on me the other day when making up dishes to try from scratch I as most chef do taste as I go along, ooops that odd taste here n there soon add up lol. I have also been looking at what my friends are eating many are reduced portion sizes of ready prepared foods, these have all sorts in the salts sugars but most of all chemicals that don't help with weight loss listen folks where possible eat food you prepare and cook yourself most frozen veg nower days are believe it or not more fresh than what you get at the shop as it is frozen soon after it is picked. I have been weighing all my foods since first week of January and lost 1.5 stone so it does work0
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Vismal do think it is a good idea to train on empty stomach? Would this assist the body to use the stored reserved energy (fat) or am I thinking wrong?0
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It's sad that you have to tell people to log everything. I thought that was common sense. Good post though; It's good to see that I'm doing mostly the right thing.0
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Hi, Im new here and i was wondering if anyone could help me? At the moment I've been juicing my food and having one meal a day (it's been working the first wewk i lost 9 1/2 pound the second i lost 2 pound) i juice a lot of veg and some fruit but after reading this you saying to weigh you food/liquids how would i do it before i juice or after and if after how? Thanks in advance.0
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Great info and well said!!!!0
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There is a lot of data saying that fasted training does not burn any more fat then fed training. If you prefer to train fasted that's fine. There might be several reasons a person might prefer it. There is nothing wrong with fasted training (I do it myself sometimes), there just isn't an added fat burn.Vismal do think it is a good idea to train on empty stomach? Would this assist the body to use the stored reserved energy (fat) or am I thinking wrong?
It's not so much that people didn't know to log everything. I think the website conveys that. It's that people don't have a clue of what an actual serving size is and you must actually weigh the food to verify a serving. If I had to convey this entire guide in 1 sentence it would be, "Track 100% of what you eat after you weigh it on a scale."It's sad that you have to tell people to log everything. I thought that was common sense. Good post though; It's good to see that I'm doing mostly the right thing.
Just weigh what you juice before you drink it. The juicing process shouldn't remove any calories.Hi, Im new here and i was wondering if anyone could help me? At the moment I've been juicing my food and having one meal a day (it's been working the first wewk i lost 9 1/2 pound the second i lost 2 pound) i juice a lot of veg and some fruit but after reading this you saying to weigh you food/liquids how would i do it before i juice or after and if after how? Thanks in advance.
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I weigh as I go so I know what is in my portion size is done. Just made a a chilli bake weighed each item individually through to the end of the cook proces then weighed it all together again and then devided in to indevidual portion sizes with the exact amount of calories for each one0
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Please, please, please forgive the redundancy of my question. I've read other answers and my (dull) brain reads to much into it and confuses me. Please respond yes or no. I want to lose the last 5lbs (.5 per week) . I set my activity level to sedentary. I do a lot of cardio about 4-5 days a week, 400 calories expended at a time. (I use a HRM with a chest strap and built in fitness testing to track my calories burned during cardio activities, so assuming expenditure is somewhat accurate.) To lose weight is it alright to include the additional calories burned from cardio in to my total allotment for the day?
Thank you Everyone for contributing overall on these forums.0 -
This isn't really a yes or no question. In a perfect world, where your calories were 100% accurate (they aren't) and your heart monitor was 100% accurate (it isn't) and your body burned exactly the number of calories mfp give to someone who is sedentary (it doesn't), you would be fine eating back exactly what you burned. Unfortunately in the real world, these are all estimations. They all have margins of error and for that reason, you'll just have to try it and see what happens. Start by trying to eat back the calories, if you don't lose, eat half of them back, if you still don't lose, don't eat any of them back. Trial and error will eventually get you there.Please, please, please forgive the redundancy of my question. I've read other answers and my (dull) brain reads to much into it and confuses me. Please respond yes or no. I want to lose the last 5lbs (.5 per week) . I set my activity level to sedentary. I do a lot of cardio about 4-5 days a week, 400 calories expended at a time. (I use a HRM with a chest strap and built in fitness testing to track my calories burned during cardio activities, so assuming expenditure is somewhat accurate.) To lose weight is it alright to include the additional calories burned from cardio in to my total allotment for the day?
Thank you Everyone for contributing overall on these forums.
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I didn't realize I had to weigh condiments
I keep getting final calorie intake for the day way under what my goal is. But I think, after reading this, my margin of error is probably close to 30% 0 -
I'm starting to count my calories and log them really well. I'm recommended to be at 1460, but I feel full and still have 500 calories left. Any suggestions? I'm not sure what else to do. I've had meals and snacks already0
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Eat something high in calories that isn't filling. Peanut butter comes to mind. You could put milk, peanut butter and a banana in a blender and have a quick 500 calories in a glass.I'm starting to count my calories and log them really well. I'm recommended to be at 1460, but I feel full and still have 500 calories left. Any suggestions? I'm not sure what else to do. I've had meals and snacks already
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Eat something high in calories that isn't filling. Peanut butter comes to mind. You could put milk, peanut butter and a banana in a blender and have a quick 500 calories in a glass.I'm starting to count my calories and log them really well. I'm recommended to be at 1460, but I feel full and still have 500 calories left. Any suggestions? I'm not sure what else to do. I've had meals and snacks already
Thanks! I do love peanut butter. I can't have lactose though, and I don't like any of those substitutes.0 -
[/quote]This isn't really a yes or no question. In a perfect world, where your calories were 100% accurate (they aren't) and your heart monitor was 100% accurate (it isn't) and your body burned exactly the number of calories mfp give to someone who is sedentary (it doesn't), you would be fine eating back exactly what you burned. Unfortunately in the real world, these are all estimations. They all have margins of error and for that reason, you'll just have to try it and see what happens. Start by trying to eat back the calories, if you don't lose, eat half of them back, if you still don't lose, don't eat any of them back. Trial and error will eventually get you there.
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Thank you. Your explanation made sense and I will try this approach. I'm very new to counting calories after only relying on exercise in the past to maintain weight. I like the data this provides and the systematic approach to finding out what will work for me. Thanks again.
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This was fantastic and very helpful! What if I don't have a scale? Will measuring my peanut butter in a measuring cup be okay?0
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