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Having tried implementing calorie counting... how exactly do you do it? You either cook everything yourself and weigh every ingredient. Or you buy totally pack

Having tried implementing calorie counting... how exactly do you do it? You either cook everything yourself and weigh every ingredient. Or you buy totally packaged meals (Lite 'n Easy, etc), or you buy fast food (And even then, the calorie counts in fast food are... inaccurate at best). If I go to the corner shop and get a sandwich I have no idea what's in it and there is no accurate way to estimate. While it's good to be aware just how energy dense foods are (like muffins... aka breakfast cakes) there is no method that I'd consider both achievable for the average person to consistently do AND accurate enough to be considered 'counting' as opposed to washy estimates.

dsego 10y ago
I had success with a smartphone app (loseit) and estimating. You really don't need to be more precise. Lost 3-4 kilos in a month. Doing a rough calculation will often do the trick, that one sandwich could be 400-500 calories, and you had two beers, which is already 400-500. A weight losing calculator suggested you can eat about 2000 calories that day. So that's already half o your daily intake. But if you go run or cycle for an hour you can eat maybe 300-400 more. Keeping track breaks the bad eating habits.
davidgh 10y ago
Some years ago I spent a lot of time calorie counting. I got pretty good at estimating but more importantly became keenly aware of where the calories are hidden. You start to develop simple rules of thumb: beware of the breads and sugars, fruits are full of vitamins but can pack a calorie punch (bananas and grapes on the higher side, strawberries and melons being in the low side), most raw vegetables, negligible. Lean meats, surprisingly low relative to their help in making you feel well fed. Be cautious with cheese; sauces and dressings can be killer. You don't have to be perfect (or honestly even that precise) but it's immensely helpful to do the exercise for a few weeks to dial your brain in. When you calorie reduce at the same time, you grow razor-sharp appreciation for foods that you can eat a massive amount of that provide few calories. When you're hungry, a choice between a muffin and a tray overloaded with vegetables and turkey slices becomes a lot more clear. I've often wondered if an app that has me take a picture of everything I eat in a day and then sends me a collage of all yesterday's consumption by email in the next morning would be a suitable replacement for calorie counting. I wonder if the process of taking my phone out to photograph things before I eat them would cause me to more carefully consider my choices, and the private shaming the morning after on days I don't do well would serve as a behavior modifier for the day.
WatchDog 10y ago
Yeah it's interesting, I find myself choosing a potentially less healthy food option simply because it's nutrition information is more readily available and easily quantifiable.
jaggederest 10y ago
I calorie counted for years. You take things apart and weigh them, or make good estimates based on total weight. You don't need to be very accurate, anything within ~25% error is fine. You just need to be very consistent. The USDA has a great database that provides you all the raw materials (and many of the packaged composite items) to use, and once you've eaten a thing and recorded the values, you can simply reuse them infinitely. One ham sandwich, if you're consistent about it, is a given calorie intake. The key is what that lets you do: It lets you analyze your intake versus body composition and weight, determine whether you're eating too much, too little, or a bad ratio, and then make slow changes over time to fix that problem. If you're like me right now, you're overweight. Okay, look at your calorie count, reduce it by say 5% or 10%, wait a month, see how your body composition changes, and reanalyze. With this method you don't need to be dead-on-balls-accurate with your calorie counting, only consistent and reasonable.
- mikekchar 10y ago
  As bizarre as it may sound, I have found that buying only pre-packaged food for a few weeks really helps people get a ballpark feel for what 1900 calories (or whatever) looks/feels like. Because the calories on packaged food exist by law (even if they aren't always completely accurate), it's a really easy way learn about it. After that people can develop some intuition (like, "I only ate a few mouthfuls of cheese. How many calories could that be?" or "It's just trail mix. It's healthy. Peanuts and raisins. Like 0 calories!" or "I just have a single bran muffin and a coffee for breakfast. It's not even a meal" or... well you get the idea).
cardine 10y ago
I have a scale in my kitchen and I weigh everything. For most restaurant food you can look up the calorie information really easily. So for me it is a very small minority of food that I can't get an exact number on and I've been weighing and entering things enough that for those edge cases I can usually do a decent job at eyeballing serving sizes.
chrisfosterelli 10y ago
If you go to the corner store and get a sandwich, just put a rough estimate of a sandwich based on the sandwich options in your app and what you think seems right. You learn to make smart estimates when you start counting the calories on everything. Even then, washy estimates are just fine, just put them on the conservative side (ie, overestimate when you have to estimate). Calories are never an exact numerical science anyways, even if you did weigh everything precisely. You really don't care if you have a margin of error of 50-200 calories if you are lower than your goal most days. You still loose weight. I've been using MyFitnessPal on and off throughout the years and have always been able to consistently gain or loose weight (depending what I am aiming for) even when relying highly on estimates. This is just my experience though.
- KSS42 10y ago
  The Fitbit app is great for counting calories. Very easy to use and it has a great database.
flat6turbo 10y ago
> If I go to the corner shop and get a sandwich I have no idea what's in it and there is no accurate way to estimate. uh, why not? i'll do it right now for you off the top of my head, which anyone can do after they look them up for a while. 100g of white bread = ~ 250 calories / 2 tbsp of mayo = ~ 200 calories / 4 oz of deli turkey = ~ 100 calories / 1 tbsp mustard = ~ 10 calories / 2 slices (2 oz.) of cheese = ~ 240 calories / 2 slices of tomato = ~ 20 calories / 1 slice of lettuce = ~ 5 calories / 1 bag of chips = ~ 280 calories (probably on the bag) there. 1105 calories total. is that perfect? no, but is that useful? yes, a whole lot more useful than "it's too hard, so i might as well not do it." as an aside: this is why people are fat. a sandwich and a bag of chips is insulin-spiking can easily be over 1k calories, and most people would probably guess it's 300 calories, and 'not fattening', whatever that means. throw in a soda and you've got a recipe (literally) for disaster.
- rlanday 10y ago
  A can of soda is only about 140 calories. I.e. half the calories in the bread. I think it gets a way worse reputation than it deserves.
  - antisthenes 10y ago
    What about a medium sized soda at a fast-food place? Those places use consumer surplus as an incentive to get a larger drink, so seeing people with huge cups, presumably filled with soda is very common. Besides, 140 calories is a lot, considering it has about the same calorie density as milk and the number of great drinks available to you at 0 calories, like black tea, green tea, coffee and plain water. Soda is sugar only, always, so it's much easier to throw your daily balance of carb/protein/fat off with soda than any other drink (e.g. milk).
- OtterCoder 10y ago
  One time, as a continually hungry teen, I did a one day calorie count for a scout project. I was suitably horrified to find out at the end of the day that I had consumed around 10,000 calories.
- 10y ago
randlet 10y ago
Spend a couple of weeks/months preparing your own food and weighing everything. Use an app like MyFitnessPal to record and count your calories. It doesn't take very long to develop an intuition that's "good enough" about how many calories a deli sandwich contains.
- Retric 10y ago
  2% extra calories per day ~= gaining 6 pounds a year. I doubt you can get within 2% making this far less useful. Basically, you need a feedback mechanism like your actual weight. Counting calories is not about actual calories it's a way to cut back if your not getting the results you want.
  - randlet 10y ago
    Yes, sorry I should have mentioned that. You need to track your weight along with counting calories and make adjustments to your caloric intake based on the weight you are gaining/losing. You don't need to be within 2% accuracy (frankly that's not feasible anyways) just consistent.
zeamaize 10y ago
I do strict calorie counting. I cook most of what I eat and do volumetric estimation on the rare days I eat out.

dsego 10y ago

I had success with a smartphone app (loseit) and estimating. You really don't need to be more precise. Lost 3-4 kilos in a month. Doing a rough calculation will often do the trick, that one sandwich could be 400-500 calories, and you had two beers, which is already 400-500. A weight losing calculator suggested you can eat about 2000 calories that day. So that's already half o your daily intake. But if you go run or cycle for an hour you can eat maybe 300-400 more. Keeping track breaks the bad eating habits.

davidgh 10y ago

Some years ago I spent a lot of time calorie counting. I got pretty good at estimating but more importantly became keenly aware of where the calories are hidden. You start to develop simple rules of thumb: beware of the breads and sugars, fruits are full of vitamins but can pack a calorie punch (bananas and grapes on the higher side, strawberries and melons being in the low side), most raw vegetables, negligible. Lean meats, surprisingly low relative to their help in making you feel well fed. Be cautious with cheese; sauces and dressings can be killer. You don't have to be perfect (or honestly even that precise) but it's immensely helpful to do the exercise for a few weeks to dial your brain in. When you calorie reduce at the same time, you grow razor-sharp appreciation for foods that you can eat a massive amount of that provide few calories. When you're hungry, a choice between a muffin and a tray overloaded with vegetables and turkey slices becomes a lot more clear. I've often wondered if an app that has me take a picture of everything I eat in a day and then sends me a collage of all yesterday's consumption by email in the next morning would be a suitable replacement for calorie counting. I wonder if the process of taking my phone out to photograph things before I eat them would cause me to more carefully consider my choices, and the private shaming the morning after on days I don't do well would serve as a behavior modifier for the day.

WatchDog 10y ago

Yeah it's interesting, I find myself choosing a potentially less healthy food option simply because it's nutrition information is more readily available and easily quantifiable.

jaggederest 10y ago

I calorie counted for years. You take things apart and weigh them, or make good estimates based on total weight. You don't need to be very accurate, anything within ~25% error is fine. You just need to be very consistent. The USDA has a great database that provides you all the raw materials (and many of the packaged composite items) to use, and once you've eaten a thing and recorded the values, you can simply reuse them infinitely. One ham sandwich, if you're consistent about it, is a given calorie intake. The key is what that lets you do: It lets you analyze your intake versus body composition and weight, determine whether you're eating too much, too little, or a bad ratio, and then make slow changes over time to fix that problem. If you're like me right now, you're overweight. Okay, look at your calorie count, reduce it by say 5% or 10%, wait a month, see how your body composition changes, and reanalyze. With this method you don't need to be dead-on-balls-accurate with your calorie counting, only consistent and reasonable.

mikekchar 10y ago
As bizarre as it may sound, I have found that buying only pre-packaged food for a few weeks really helps people get a ballpark feel for what 1900 calories (or whatever) looks/feels like. Because the calories on packaged food exist by law (even if they aren't always completely accurate), it's a really easy way learn about it. After that people can develop some intuition (like, "I only ate a few mouthfuls of cheese. How many calories could that be?" or "It's just trail mix. It's healthy. Peanuts and raisins. Like 0 calories!" or "I just have a single bran muffin and a coffee for breakfast. It's not even a meal" or... well you get the idea).

cardine 10y ago

I have a scale in my kitchen and I weigh everything. For most restaurant food you can look up the calorie information really easily. So for me it is a very small minority of food that I can't get an exact number on and I've been weighing and entering things enough that for those edge cases I can usually do a decent job at eyeballing serving sizes.

chrisfosterelli 10y ago

If you go to the corner store and get a sandwich, just put a rough estimate of a sandwich based on the sandwich options in your app and what you think seems right. You learn to make smart estimates when you start counting the calories on everything. Even then, washy estimates are just fine, just put them on the conservative side (ie, overestimate when you have to estimate). Calories are never an exact numerical science anyways, even if you did weigh everything precisely. You really don't care if you have a margin of error of 50-200 calories if you are lower than your goal most days. You still loose weight. I've been using MyFitnessPal on and off throughout the years and have always been able to consistently gain or loose weight (depending what I am aiming for) even when relying highly on estimates. This is just my experience though.

KSS42 10y ago
The Fitbit app is great for counting calories. Very easy to use and it has a great database.

flat6turbo 10y ago

> If I go to the corner shop and get a sandwich I have no idea what's in it and there is no accurate way to estimate. uh, why not? i'll do it right now for you off the top of my head, which anyone can do after they look them up for a while. 100g of white bread = ~ 250 calories / 2 tbsp of mayo = ~ 200 calories / 4 oz of deli turkey = ~ 100 calories / 1 tbsp mustard = ~ 10 calories / 2 slices (2 oz.) of cheese = ~ 240 calories / 2 slices of tomato = ~ 20 calories / 1 slice of lettuce = ~ 5 calories / 1 bag of chips = ~ 280 calories (probably on the bag) there. 1105 calories total. is that perfect? no, but is that useful? yes, a whole lot more useful than "it's too hard, so i might as well not do it." as an aside: this is why people are fat. a sandwich and a bag of chips is insulin-spiking can easily be over 1k calories, and most people would probably guess it's 300 calories, and 'not fattening', whatever that means. throw in a soda and you've got a recipe (literally) for disaster.

rlanday 10y ago
A can of soda is only about 140 calories. I.e. half the calories in the bread. I think it gets a way worse reputation than it deserves.
- antisthenes 10y ago
  What about a medium sized soda at a fast-food place? Those places use consumer surplus as an incentive to get a larger drink, so seeing people with huge cups, presumably filled with soda is very common. Besides, 140 calories is a lot, considering it has about the same calorie density as milk and the number of great drinks available to you at 0 calories, like black tea, green tea, coffee and plain water. Soda is sugar only, always, so it's much easier to throw your daily balance of carb/protein/fat off with soda than any other drink (e.g. milk).
OtterCoder 10y ago
One time, as a continually hungry teen, I did a one day calorie count for a scout project. I was suitably horrified to find out at the end of the day that I had consumed around 10,000 calories.
10y ago

randlet 10y ago

Spend a couple of weeks/months preparing your own food and weighing everything. Use an app like MyFitnessPal to record and count your calories. It doesn't take very long to develop an intuition that's "good enough" about how many calories a deli sandwich contains.

Retric 10y ago
2% extra calories per day ~= gaining 6 pounds a year. I doubt you can get within 2% making this far less useful. Basically, you need a feedback mechanism like your actual weight. Counting calories is not about actual calories it's a way to cut back if your not getting the results you want.
- randlet 10y ago
  Yes, sorry I should have mentioned that. You need to track your weight along with counting calories and make adjustments to your caloric intake based on the weight you are gaining/losing. You don't need to be within 2% accuracy (frankly that's not feasible anyways) just consistent.

zeamaize 10y ago

I do strict calorie counting. I cook most of what I eat and do volumetric estimation on the rare days I eat out.