Natural weight loss at home with diet, nutrition, fitness, and training tips from theory to practice

Counting calories in 3 cheap and easy steps

Counting calories is an essential part of any weight loss program - at least when you first start out trying to lose weight. Learn how you can use tools that are either freely available or cost little money to create your own efficient calorie counter to keep track of the amount of calories, protein, carbohydrate, and fat you eat on a daily basis.

In a previous article, I mentioned that there are digital calorie counters on the market you could buy to keep track of the daily foods you eat and for counting calories.

But to be totally honest, you don’t really need any sophisticated tools to be able to keep track of the amount of calories you eat on a daily basis.

All you need for counting calories you eat every day is:

1. A journal or a digital equivalent such as a spreadsheet program.
2. The nutrition label on the packaging of foods.
3. A calorie guide for foods that do not have a nutrition label such as for example fruits and vegetables.

1. Get a diet journal or spreadsheet application for counting calories

For counting calories on a daily basis, I use Microsoft Office Excel. But if you do not own a copy of Excel, you can also use the free online spreadsheet application Google offers through Google Docs.

The following spreadsheet is an example of how you could lay out and what you would have to register in the spreadsheet. The spreadsheet was created using Google Docs.

Left of the gray line I’ve registered the nutritional values of foods per serving size, then on the right of the gray line I’ve registered the exact amount of each food I’ve eaten during a particular day.

The values on the right use the values on the left in formulas, so all I have to do is for example type in that I ate 30 grams of oats on that day, and the amount of calories, protein, fat, and carbs would be automatically calculated based on the values on the left.

You can download the PDF version of the sample spreadsheet if you like to get an idea of how you can register your own daily calories.

2. Read the nutrition label on the packaging of foods

Almost all foods that are bought in cans and other packaging come with a nutrition label on the packaging listing the amount of calories, protein, fats, and carbohydrates per serving or per a certain amount of grams of that food, which makes it easy for counting calories in your diet.

In general, you can just copy this information over to your journal, and if you’re using a digital spreadsheet program such as Excel or Google Docs, you can use formulas to perform calculations when converting serving sizes to the real amount of food you’ve eaten (see the spreadsheet sample above).

If you don’t know how to read nutrition labels, see How to understand and use the nutrition facts label.

3. Look up certain foods in a food or calorie guide

Certain foods such as fruits and vegetables do not come with a nutrition label. So if you consume such foods – which I hope you do – you’ll need to look up the nutritional values of these foods in a food or calorie guide.

Where a food or calorie guide goes, you’ve got 2 options: You can either buy a calorie guide from Amazon.com or from a bookstore, but you can also perform a free search on the Internet through the nutrient database offered by the USDA.

Putting it all together when counting calories

Once you’ve gone through the 3 steps I mentioned above, you can then start registering the foods you eat on a daily basis. And if you’re using a digital diet journal, that is, a spreadsheet, you can just save all of them on your computer for future reference.

If you’re anything like me, your diet won’t be too diverse that it will require you to create an entirely new spreadsheet every time, so you can use the same base version of your spreadsheet day after day and week after week for counting calories.

And should you happen to vary your diet by eating new foods that you haven’t previously put in your spreadsheet, you can just modify the base version of the spreadsheet to contain those new foods.

You can reuse your diet spreadsheet every day by saving it as a new file, and then clearing out the fields you entered for the previous day. What I usually do is have a spreadsheet for each week and create tabs within each spreadsheet for each day of the week. Then at the end of the week, I rename the spreadsheet to identify the week it was for, copy it, rename the new version, and then clear out all of the serving sizes (on the right side of the gray line in the spreadsheet mentioned above) in the new version so that it is ready for counting calories for the next week.