How to count calories in food
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Most people quit tracking in the first fortnight, and it is almost never because the maths was hard.
Start with the three kinds of food
Packaged food is solved. The label gives calories per 100 grams and per portion. The only trap is the portion: manufacturers choose it, and it is frequently smaller than what anyone eats.
Home cooking is arithmetic. Add the calories of the raw ingredients, including every spoon of oil and butter, then divide by the number of servings. Cooking destroys almost no energy, so what goes into the pan comes out of it.
Restaurant food cannot be counted, only estimated. Kitchens use more fat than you would at home, and the same dish varies from one place to another. Estimate, add twenty percent, and move on.
Weigh four things, estimate the rest
You do not need to weigh vegetables. The whole error in a bowl of salad leaves is smaller than the error in one careless pour of olive oil.
Weigh the dense things: oil and butter, nuts and nut butters, cheese, and anything made of flour or sugar. Those four categories hold most of the calories and almost all of the mistakes. Everything else can be eyeballed with a portion guide.
Why people give up, and how not to
Tracking fails when it takes longer than eating. Searching a database for the right version of a chicken breast, then choosing between nine entries with different numbers, is the moment most people stop.
Two habits fix it. Log immediately rather than at the end of the day, because memory is the weakest link. And accept an approximate entry over a perfect one: an estimate you record beats an exact figure you never enter.
How accurate does this need to be?
Studies of self-reported intake regularly find people under-report by twenty to thirty percent, usually without meaning to. If your count says 1,800 and the scale disagrees for three weeks, trust the scale and adjust, rather than assuming your metabolism is unusual.
Stop doing this by hand
Or photograph the plate and let the app do the estimating, which is the version most people actually keep up.
Get Kalixo free on the App StoreQuestions people actually ask
Do I count calories raw or cooked?
Raw, for anything that loses water when cooked, which means most meat and all pasta and rice. A hundred grams of dry pasta becomes about 250 grams cooked, and the calories do not change.
Do I need to count vegetables?
Not really, apart from starchy ones like potato, corn and peas. The counting effort is high and the calorie payoff is tiny.
What about oil left in the pan?
Count what you poured, not what ended up on the plate, unless you can see meaningful oil left behind. Over a week the difference is small compared to forgetting to count it at all.
Is an app more accurate than a food scale?
No, and nothing is. A scale plus a label is the most accurate method available at home. An app that estimates from a photo trades some accuracy for the fact that you will still be using it next month.