Tracking your food and calorie intake can be important.Research shows that people who log calories lose more weight and are likelier to keep the weight off in the long run (, ).These days, counting calories is very easy. There are many useful websites and apps that help you log your meals and track your intake.This article reviews the five best calorie counters available today.All of them are accessible online, and signing up takes less than a minute. They all have apps for iPhone, iPad and Android.Last but not least, most of them are free. MyFitnessPal is one of the most popular calorie counters right now.It tracks your weight and calculates a recommended daily. It also contains a well-designed food diary and an exercise log.The homepage provides a clear picture of how many calories you've consumed during the day. In addition, it shows your remaining recommended intake and the number of calories you’ve burned by.If you're using a fitness tracking device, MyFitnessPal can likely sync with it to include its data in the exercise log.The app tracks your progress towards your goals and offers chat forums with fellow users. The forums include conversations, recipes, tips and personal success stories.MyFitnessPal's nutrition database is very extensive, containing over 5 million foods.
You can also download recipes from the internet or create custom foods and dishes.The app even saves your favorite meals for convenient logging.Additionally, MyFitnessPal’s barcode scanner allows you to instantly enter the nutrition information of some packaged foods.Each day is presented as a pie chart, showing your breakdown of carbs, protein and fat. You can also write a note for each day, recording how things went or how you were feeling.MyFitnessPal does offer a free version.
However, some of its features can only be accessed in the premium version, which is $49.99 per year.Pros:. MyFitnessPal has the largest database available in a diet tracker and includes many restaurant foods. It can download recipes from the internet and calculate the calorie content of each serving. You can 'quick add' calories if you don't have the time to add details about a certain meal.Cons:. Since most foods are uploaded by other users, the calorie count may not be entirely accurate. Multiple entries may exist for the same product.
Serving sizes in the database may be hard to edit, creating difficulties if your serving was smaller or larger than the one listed.More:. Is another health tracker that includes an easy-to-use food diary and exercise log. You can also connect a pedometer or other fitness device.Based on your weight, height, age and goals, Lose It! Provides a personalized recommendation for calorie intake.
It then tracks your calories on the homepage.It features a comprehensive food database and an icon representing each food entry. The food diary is simple and user-friendly. Adding new foods is not complicated.Additionally, the Lose It! App has a barcode scanner for packaged foods, and common foods are saved for quick entry later on.Lose It! Presents weight changes on a graph, provides access to an active chat community and keeps a daily and weekly total.Its tab called 'challenges' allows you to participate in dietary challenges or make your own.With a premium membership, which is $39.99 a year, you can set more goals, log additional information and get some extra features.Pros:. Lose It! Has a food database complete with popular restaurants, grocery stores and brand-name foods, all of which are verified by their team of experts.
The app lets you set reminders to log your meals and.Cons:. It’s hard to log home-cooked meals or calculate their nutritional value. The app can be tricky to navigate. Lose It! Doesn't track.More:. FatSecret is a free calorie counter. It includes a food diary, nutrition database, healthy recipes, exercise log, and journal.A barcode scanner helps track packaged foods.The homepage shows total calorie intake, as well as the breakdown of carbs, protein and fat — displayed both for the day and for each meal.FatSecret offers a monthly summary view, which gives total calories consumed each day and total averages for each month.
This feature may be convenient to track your overall progress.This calorie counter is very user-friendly. Cron-o-meter lets you easily keep track of your diet, exercises and body weight.It offers exact serving sizes and a strong exercise database. If you are pregnant or lactating, you can select a customized profile based on higher calorie needs.You can also tell Cron-o-meter if you're following a specific diet, such as the, low-carb diet or a low-fat vegetarian diet. This changes the macronutrient recommendations.The food diary is very simple and user-friendly. SparkPeople is another full-featured calorie counter that tracks nutrition, activities, goals and progress.The food diary is relatively straightforward. If you tend to eat the same thing often, you can paste that entry into multiple days.At the bottom of each day's entry, you can see the total calories, carbs, and protein. You may also view the data as a pie chart.Recipes are very easy to add, and the app is equipped with a barcode scanner so you can register packaged foods.SparkPeople's site has a massive community.
Its resources include recipes, health news, exercise demos and articles by health and wellness experts.The free version has one of the largest online food and nutrition databases, but you have to upgrade your account to access many of the other features.Pros:. The website is full of resources on a variety of topics.Cons:.
The site may be overwhelming for new users since it contains so much information. The content is spread over several apps based on different forums. For example, there is one app for pregnant women and another for recipes.
Users sometimes have trouble logging foods into the app.More:.
It’s no secret that Americans are fatter today than ever before, and not just those unlucky people who are genetically inclined to gain weight or have been overweight all their lives. Many who were lean as young adults have put on lots of unhealthy pounds as they pass into middle age and beyond.It’s also no secret that the long-recommended advice to eat less and exercise more has done little to curb the inexorable rise in weight. The analysis examined how an array of factors influenced weight gain or loss during each four-year period of the study. The average participant gained 3.35 pounds every four years, for a total weight gain of 16.8 pounds in 20 years.“This study shows that conventional wisdom — to eat everything in moderation, eat fewer calories and avoid fatty foods — isn’t the best approach,” Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian, a cardiologist and epidemiologist at the Harvard School of Public Health and lead author of the study, said in an interview. “What you eat makes quite a difference. Just counting calories won’t matter much unless you look at the kinds of calories you’re eating.”Dr.
Counting Calories Program
Hu, a nutrition expert at the Harvard School of Public Health and a co-author of the new analysis, said: “In the past, too much emphasis has been put on single factors in the diet. But looking for a magic bullet hasn’t solved the problem of obesity.”Also untrue, Dr. Mozaffarian said, is the food industry’s claim that there’s no such thing as a bad food.“There are good foods and bad foods, and the advice should be to eat the good foods more and the bad foods less,” he said. “The notion that it’s O.K. To eat everything in moderation is just an excuse to eat whatever you want.”The study showed that physical activity had the expected benefits for weight control. Those who exercised less over the course of the study tended to gain weight, while those who increased their activity didn’t. Those with the greatest increase in physical activity gained 1.76 fewer pounds than the rest of the participants within each four-year period.But the researchers found that the kinds of foods people ate had a larger effect over all than changes in physical activity.
Advertisement“Both physical activity and diet are important to weight control, but if you are fairly active and ignore diet, you can still gain weight,” said Dr. Walter Willett, chairman of the nutrition department at the Harvard School of Public Health and a co-author of the study.As Dr. Mozaffarian observed, “Physical activity in the United States is poor, but diet is even worse.”Little Things Mean a LotPeople don’t become overweight overnight.Rather, the pounds creep up slowly, often unnoticed, until one day nothing in the closet fits the way it used to. CreditYvetta FedorovaEven more important than its effect on looks and wardrobe, this gradual weight gain harms health. At least six prior studies have found that rising weight increases the risk in women of heart disease, diabetes, stroke and breast cancer, and the risk in men of heart disease, diabetes and colon cancer.The beauty of the new study is its ability to show, based on real-life experience, how small changes in eating, exercise and other habits can result in large changes in body weight over the years.On average, study participants gained a pound a year, which added up to 20 pounds in 20 years. Some gained much more, about four pounds a year, while a few managed to stay the same or even lose weight.
Participants who were overweight at the study’s start tended to gain the most weight, which seriously raised their risk of obesity-related diseases, Dr. “People who are already overweight have to be particularly careful about what they eat,” he said.The foods that contributed to the greatest weight gain were not surprising. French fries led the list: Increased consumption of this food alone was linked to an average weight gain of 3.4 pounds in each four-year period. Other important contributors were potato chips (1.7 pounds), sugar-sweetened drinks (1 pound), red meats and processed meats (0.95 and 0.93 pound, respectively), other forms of potatoes (0.57 pound), sweets and desserts (0.41 pound), refined grains (0.39 pound), other fried foods (0.32 pound), 100-percent fruit juice (0.31 pound) and butter (0.3 pound).Also not too surprising were most of the foods that resulted in weight loss or no gain when consumed in greater amounts during the study: fruits, vegetables and whole grains. Compared with those who gained the most weight, participants in the Nurses’ Health Study who lost weight consumed 3.1 more servings of vegetables each day.
AdvertisementAlcohol intake had an interesting relationship to weight changes. No significant effect was found among those who increased their intake to one glass of wine a day, but increases in other forms of alcohol were likely to bring added pounds.As expected, changes in smoking habits also influenced weight changes. Compared with people who never smoked, those who had quit smoking within the previous four years gained an average of 5.17 pounds. Subsequent weight gain was minimal — 0.14 pound for each four-year period.Those who continued smoking lost 0.7 pound in each four-year period, which the researchers surmised may have resulted from undiagnosed underlying disease, especially since those who took up smoking experienced no change in weight.