What is calorie tracking?
Tracking calories (also referred to as counting calories) just means keeping some sort of log of everything you eat or drink throughout the day that contains calories. The easiest way to do this these days is with an app on your phone, but you could also do it with pen and paper or an Excel spreadsheet if you really wanted to!
Fundamentally, calories come from the three main macronutrients: Protein, Fat, and Carbohydrates.
- 1g Protein = 4 calories
- 1g Carbohydrates = 4 calories
- 1g Fat = 9 calories
Note that fats are over twice as calorie-dense as protein and carbs.
Why would I want to track calories?
We will go more into depth as we continue our Fundamentals series, but at a high level, your body uses calories as energy as you go about your day. If you eat more calories than you use, then you will gain weight. If you eat fewer calories than you use, then you will lose weight.
So tracking calories is just a tool to manage your weight, and make it go in the direction that you want, and it is directly under your control.
Just try it for a week
If nothing else, I would recommend that everybody try this for a week, even if you don’t have any particular weight management goals. Tracking calories for the first time is an eye-opening experience, and helps give you a strong understanding of what is going into your body. You will learn a lot about what things get added to food that make it more calorie-dense, and how you might want to tweak the food you eat regularly.
Many people at some point in their lives will want to manage their weight to some degree for various reasons, so this is a good tool for anybody to have in their belt.
How do I track calories?
The basic concept here is that you will use the nutrition label on foods to see how many calories a serving has, and use the actual serving sizes to determine how many calories of that food you have eaten.
Let’s dig into the details a bit on the best ways to actually do this in practice.
Tracking different types of foods
Foods in package (e.g., boxes with nutrition labels)
Most food you can buy on grocery store shelves (in the US at least) is required to have a nutritional label on the package. Per the FDA:
“Food labeling is required for most prepared foods, such as breads, cereals, canned and frozen foods, snacks, desserts, drinks, etc. Nutrition labeling for raw produce (fruits and vegetables) and fish is voluntary. ”1
Here is an example nutrition label:
Strictly for counting calories, the only part of this you will need is the Calories at the top and the serving size. Calories are listed at 230 “per serving” and the serving is listed in this example as 2/3 cup (55g). If you have more than one serving, you just multiply the calories based on how many servings you had.
- 2/3 cup = 1 serving = 230 calories
- 1 1/3 cups = 2 servings = 460 calories
- 2 cups = 3 servings = 690 calories
Foods that have a label are one of the easiest to track because all the information is provided for you upfront.
Foods not in a package (e.g., fruits, vegetables)
As noted above, labeling on raw produce is optional and usually isn’t included. The easiest way to track this is to use one of the apps we discuss below to put in the fruit or vegetable. There will typically be an option for the estimated size of your item and standard calories for that item.
For example, if you want the calories in an onion, you can search for “onion” in the app, and you will see different types of onions and different sizes like medium or large.
If you prefer not to use the apps, the FDA does keep downloadable and printable posters of nutrition facts for raw fruits and vegetables with serving sizes
Home-made Food
You might be wondering how to count calories with homemade food. This can be tricky for beginners because it is typically a combination of several ingredients. For food that you are making yourself, this isn’t too bad because you will be able to know and keep track of each ingredient. However, trying to count calories from food someone else made at home can be challenging.
Self-made Food
On the bright side, typically recipes have set measurements for various items, so you will already be measuring things out! This means you can just take the recipe and find the ingredients in your fitness tracker and enter how much of each you used.
Again, the easiest way to do this is with the calorie tracker apps. They even offer the ability to create a recipe in the app with the list of ingredients and amounts used, and will do all the calculations for you and save the recipe for easy future re-use. Ingredients should always be measured in their raw form when considering for calories, unless the nutrition label for the food specifically says that the serving size is for a cooked portion.
Once you have all the ingredients entered in, the only thing left to know is how many servings of the total recipe you are eating with each meal.
As an example, let’s say you made a lasagna and the ingredients you used total 5,000 calories. You could choose to split the lasagna into 10 servings, and they will be 500 calories each, since 5,000/10 = 500. If you want more or fewer calories per serving, you can just adjust on your own and decide how many servings you would like it to be.
For something like a lasagna, splitting the full dish into servings is easy, since you can just cut it into pieces. What would you do for something like a chili though? The best way to handle food like this is to use a big bowl and a kitchen food scale (affiliate link). You will sit the bowl on the food scale, zero out the scale, then add ALL the chili to the bowl and see what the total weight is. You can also weigh out a casserole dish/whatever you’re cooking in before you add food, and write down the weight. Then, once the food is done cooking (and cooled off enough), you can weigh the food and the dish, and just subtract the weight of the dish to get the weight of the meal.
As an example, if the total weight of the chili is 1,000 grams, and you know that the total calories from the ingredients is 5,000 calories, then you know that a 500 calorie serving of your chili is 200 grams. From here, you can either pre-split it into bowls with 200g each or we like to just stick a post-it note on top of the big chili bowl with the serving size. Then we can just scoop out a serving each time we go to use it.
Food Made by Others
Home-made food that is made by others where you have no input is probably the hardest category to track. Limiting this source of food altogether is the best course of action, but is not always possible. Generally, the best course of action here will be to just try to identify the ingredients the best you can and make a rough estimate for that meal. You should round up 15% or so over what you think so that you can err on the side of caution. You never know how much butter, oil, etc. somebody has added to their dish.
Not only that, but you can also search in your tracking app for the name of the dish, and pick one of the entries that seems closest to what you are eating. There’s usually something already in their databases that’s a pretty good ballpark. As long as this doesn’t happen every day, it won’t matter too much if you are a little off.
Restaurants that publish nutrition
A lot of fast-food restaurants, and a couple of sit-down restaurants, do publish their full nutritional information. This is usually somewhere on their website, and some even have helpful calculators built into this section so that you can see the impact of various food customizations. You can typically find this by doing a Google search for “Starbucks nutrition” or “Starbucks calorie calculator”, as an example. Some restaurants will just have a calorie number on their menu next to the items, but they may not have full nutritional info available. The calorie number is better than nothing, at least!
Most large chains will also already have their food items documented in the calorie tracking apps like MyFitnessPal and MacroFactor. This makes it as simple as searching for the dish and the name of the restaurant and just entering your servings.
Restaurants that don’t publish nutrition
Small independent restaurants will very rarely have calorie or other nutritional information available. In these cases, you are left with doing your best guess in pretty much the same way as home-made food that other people have prepared. This is another one that I would recommend limiting the frequency of, just because of the difficulty with accurately tracking them long-term.
No reason to avoid them entirely, but it’s going to make your tracking more difficult if you try to go to a place like this a couple of times a week.
Alcohol
Alcohol is a calorie source that is often overlooked when counting calories. Alcohol contains 7 calories per gram, which makes it almost as calorie-dense as fat!2
For an example, let’s look at Coors Light calories. A 12 oz. can of Coors Light has 102 calories. 34
You might notice that the label only shows 5g of carbs, 0g fat, and <1g of protein. Normally, this would be around 25 calories total, but the alcohol/ethanol is not shown independently on the nutrition label, it is only incorporated into the calorie total.
The more alcohol by volume the drink has, the higher the calorie total will be, and it can add up fast! A single 1.5oz shot of Everclear (95% alcohol by volume) comes in at a whopping 285 calories.5
Kitchen Food Scale Tips
- Get whichever one is on sale, they all mostly work the same, so no reason to spend a lot of money on this
- Learn to use the “tare” function on your scale, which sets the scale to 0 while you have something sitting on it. This lets you weigh ingredients one after the other, and weigh them out in a bowl or plate sitting on the scale.
- Use grams, it’s just a lot simpler than dealing with pounds and ounces
- Measure raw ingredients when cooking (unless ingredient nutrition label specifies cooked serving sizes)
- Weigh entire prepared meal in a bowl/serving plate after cooking to split into servings
- Don’t forget to sit the empty dish on the scale and zero it out before adding the food.
- Or weigh the empty dish beforehand, nothing the weight somewhere. And then weigh the entire dish with food in it after it has cooked; subtract the empty dish weight from this number, and you’ll have the weight of the food.
- Especially useful when multiple people will be eating from this dish over a few days.
- We use post-it notes and just stick the serving size in grams on top of the lid of the bowl in the fridge.
- Don’t forget to sit the empty dish on the scale and zero it out before adding the food.
Apps to Use
MyFitnessPal vs. Cronometer vs. MacroFactor
There are plenty of different apps you can use to track calories, but I’ll just share some strengths of three of the most popular ones.
MyFitnessPal
MyFitnessPal is free to use, but has a premium paid upgrade. It has a massive food database, which has food added by both the company and by its users. This does sometimes lead to near-duplicates and incorrect info from user-entered data, but the majority of the time you will get what you expect at the top of a search. MFP allows you to enter and save custom foods, meals, and recipes so that you have an easier time re-entering the things you eat regularly.
It also has some light social features, so you can follow your friends and make your food diary public so that your friends can see it and copy food from it. The interface is also fairly un-complicated and lets you split your food entires intuitively into groups like “Breakfast”, “Lunch”, “Dinner” and whatever else you want to name them.
Cronometer
Cronometer is also free to use, but has a premium paid upgrade. There are two main strengths for Cronometer in my opinion. First, it will break out and track a long list of vitamins and micronutrients against the recommended daily values for you based on your food inputs. This is especially helpful for vegans, since there are a few extra vitamins and minerals we need to be more aware of getting in our daily diets.
Second, Cronometer does not allow users to directly enter food data into the public database. All entries are vetted and entered by Cronometer staff. This means it does not suffer from some of the messiness in searching that MyFitnessPal has.
This one isn’t major, but Cronometer also allows you to share your custom recipes with others to use as recipes in their own Cronometer.
MacroFactor
MacroFactor does not have a free tier, but it does have a 7-day free trial. It handles things a bit differently by having an automatic diet coach feature built-in. It will track your calories like the other apps, but goes a step further and looks at your weigh-ins to continuously update your daily calorie goal to support your weight goal.
Tips to track accurately
Days in advance
Something I find helpful is to enter food in advance for future days. This allows you to plan for the next day or even a whole week of meals. It is especially helpful when you are trying to hit a specific protein goal because you can enter in tomorrow’s meals, for example. If you know in advance what you will need to eat to hit your protein, then you’ll know exactly how many Sour Patch Kids you’ll be able to sneak in without derailing your goals.
Oils and snacks count
When you are first starting out with counting calories, there are some things that are easy to overlook, but are very impactful. Number one on this list would have to be oil. There are about 120 calories in a single tablespoon of extra virgin olive oil. Many people are in the habit of just pouring some oil in the pan or over top of their food without measuring it too closely, and the calories from doing this can stack up quickly if you aren’t careful.
Snacks are also another big one that people tend not to track. Maybe when you’re walking through the kitchen you grab a handful of chips, Sour Patch Kids, nuts, or whatever else. You really want to make sure you are tracking anything at all that you eat or drink in the day that has calories. Especially in the case of snacks, fats and sugars add up very fast, even when you feel like you haven’t eaten very much.
A very common problem is that people only track the big meals and slack off on tracking these other details, and then wonder why they aren’t getting the results they expect. You can’t manage what you don’t measure.
Weigh your food
Nutrition labels will have serving sizes using all sorts of implements like scoops, teaspoons, tablespoons, number of crackers, cups, etc. The issue is that these are not terribly accurate methods. What does 10 chips mean if they’re all different sizes? Do you level off the tablespoon? You might also be surprised to know that most scoops included with foods, even supplements like protein powders, don’t actually get you the listed serving size.
Due to all of these inconsistencies and more, it is much easier to just weigh your food on a kitchen food scale using grams. Almost all nutrition labels also list the serving size in grams, so you can universally use this very consistently with a cheap scale. For liquids, you will see the serving in mL instead of grams, so you can still use measuring cups and measuring spoons for these since it’s difficult to get those incorrect.
Conclusion
Let’s recap some of the major points we learned here for counting calories
- Managing calories properly is the main tool for managing body weight
- Track everything you eat or drink that has calories
- Use a kitchen scale to weight out servings
- Try to limit eating food that you don’t know the nutrition profile of
- Use calorie tracking apps to make this simple and sustainable
You should now have all the information you need to consistently and accurately track your calories. Be sure to keep an eye out for the rest of our Fundamentals blog series to understand what else to do after tracking and more.
You can also check out our podcast episode on this topic!
- https://www.fda.gov/food/food-labeling-nutrition ↩︎
- https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/alcohol-advice/calories-in-alcohol/ ↩︎
- https://www.coorslight.com/en-US/our-beer ↩︎
- https://www.healthline.com/health/food-nutrition/calorie-carb-protein-in-beer#coors-light
↩︎ - https://www.delish.com/food-news/g3513/the-alcohol-with-the-most-calories/?slide=1 ↩︎
