If most of your food comes out of a bag or box, counting calories is pretty easy. But if you eat fresh, whole foods, or buy in bulk, this task can be more challenging. Packaged foods come equipped with modern nutrition labels that detail the calories, macronutrient breakdown and micronutrient content of the food, but unlabeled foods leave you to figure it out for yourself. One way you can do this is to use a software program that will make all the calculations for you; but if you don't have one of those, you can use a good old-fashioned calorie counting book, a website or a database to look up the values and do the math on your own.
Step 1
Choose a source for your calorie information. This will be the nutrition label if the food is a packaged item; but if not, you will need to find a book or website that offers these values. One reliable source is the USDA nutrient database, which you can search online for thousands of fresh, packaged and restaurant foods.
Step 2
Pull together the list of foods you will include in your meal and the serving sizes you intend to eat. If this is a pre-packaged item, like a frozen entree, the calories will be prominently displayed on the label; if it's a simple fresh food item, like an orange, there won't be a lot for you to do except look it up. If, however, your meal consists of a combination of foods in non-standard quantities, then you are going to have to break out your calculator. By way of example, here is a basic breakfast meal with its food items and serving sizes: one cup raisin bran-type cereal, half a cup of low-fat milk and a 6-oz. glass of orange juice.
Step 3
Look up the calorie count for each of these items in its standard serving size. Check the nutrition label for packaged items, and use your alternative source for other items. Using the USDA nutrient database, the following calorie and serving sizes are given for the foods in the previous step: raisin bran cereal, one cup, 190 calories; low-fat milk, one cup, 122 calories; orange juice, one cup, 112 calories.
Step 4
Convert the standard serving sizes into your serving sizes, and calculate the calories for them by multiplying the standard calories by the fractional difference. This is not nearly as complicated as it sounds. Here is how it would work with the example meal. The raisin bran is already in the appropriate serving size, so there's nothing to do there. To get the calories in a half cup of low-fat milk, just take the half the calories in a full cup: 1/2 x 122 calories = 61 calories. Likewise, to convert one cup of orange juice into a 6-oz. serving, divide 6 oz. by 8 oz. (which is one cup), and multiply that by the one-cup calories for orange juice: 6/8 x 112 = 84 calories.
Step 5
Sum up the calories in these foods for your total meal calories. The total for this quick breakfast meal would be raisin bran cereal + low-fat milk + orange juice = 190 + 61 + 84 = 335 calories.
Tips and Warnings
- Even if the food package has a nutritional label, it is sometimes easier to do these calculations using a database or website, as many of them will do the math for you, including converting serving sizes. Most fast food places and a lot of chain restaurants have the nutrition information for their menus available as a handout or on their websites, so you won't have to do any guessing on servings and calories when you eat in those places.
- While you will no doubt have to do some estimating on serving sizes and ingredients, be aware that there can be some pretty big discrepancies in the nutritional values of otherwise similar-sounding foods. For example, in the USDA database, there are several types and brands of raisin bran cereal, but there is a 30% difference between the lowest and highest calorie count among these.
Things You'll Need
- Calculator
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