Counting calories is a controversial topic in health circles these days. Some see counting calories as part of disordered eating, and others see it as essential for weight loss. Ideally, counting calories is not a necessary part of weight loss, assuming you follow MyPlate recommendations and aim for a lower carb diet while making lifestyle choices to eat more whole foods. However, there are still good reasons for counting calories in certain populations. A calorie count may be ordered in the hospital setting to track patient’s nutrition status, or it may be used by bodybuilders who are on a bulk or cut cycle.
Calorie counting used to be a lot more difficult before the advent of mobile apps. Apps like MyFitnessPal and “Lose It!” are able to help consumers count calories, and because of their wide spread use as a significant database of foods/recipes consumers can use for determining their actual calorie counts. Even more, you can submit a recipe to these apps, with the option to allow others to look for it, with the calories, fat, carbs and protein included in a searchable database. That said, sometimes there just doesn’t exist a recipe in the database and you may need to estimate your calories. There are a few rules of thumb for estimating calories, the biggest being it’s better to overestimate the calories than underestimate. You can either try and find a comparable food, or you can choose to insert it as a recipe.
Below is MyFitnessPal’s recipe calculator. As an example, I’m going to do a recipe for barbecue shrimp stir fry.
As you can see below, I created a rough recipe of a barbacue shrimp stir fry and determined the nutrient components for the entire meal, and divided out between four serving sizes.
Let’s take an example where there may be recipes already submitted. We’ll use everybody’s favorite as a kid, peanut butter & jelly sandwiches. You can either search for a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, or you can search for individualized components.
As said before, assuming you’re eating a healthy diet and following MyPlate recommendations, weight loss should naturally occur. However, calorie counting remains a concrete way to lose weight.