Whether your goal is to lose weight, gain weight, or simply maintain your weight, you will benefit from managing how many calories you consume. Managing caloric intake can help you determine how many you are actually burning through exercise, track how many calories you have gained in a day, or ensure that you have eaten enough to stay at your current weight. Follow some basic strategies in order to keep yourself in tune with your dietary habits.
Step 1
Decide how many calories you need every day. Generally, women should be eating about 10 to 11 daily calories for each pound of body weight if they want to stay at their current weight. Men should be eating about 12 to 14 calories for each pound of body weight. Multiply your ideal weight by 10 to determine how many calories a person of that size should eat. Considering one pound of body fat contains 3,500 calories, you would need to up your caloric intake by 500 a day to gain 1 lb. in a week, or decrease it by 500 to lose that pound in the same amount of time. Continue at that rate until you have reached your goal weight.
Step 2
Assign calories to each meal of your day. If you are a female who weighs 170 lbs., but you would like to lose 5 lbs. in 5 weeks, you may end up wanting to eat 1,200 calories in a day. Divide that into three meals and two snacks, but make your breakfast and lunch a little bigger than your pre-bed meal to keep you energized throughout the day. For example, your breakfast may be 400 calories, your lunch may be 300 calories, your dinner may be 250 calories, and your in-between snacks may be 125 calories each.
Step 3
Read nutrition labels. To know how many calories are in your food, read their handy nutrition labels, or use a resource that has pre-estimated how many calories are in servings of produce. You can also find out how many calories are in common dining-out options by checking their websites online in advance.
Step 4
Track what you take in and burn off. You can use an old-fashioned tracking device such as a paper and pen, go more high-tech by entering it in your hand-held mobile device, or use a fancy meal tracker online (see Resources). Determine when you will enter in what you have eaten, and make it a routine.
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