Calculate Your Daily Calorie Needs: A Simple Guide

Whether you are trying to lose, gain or maintain your weight, it is important to calculate your total caloric intake each day. The Institute of Medicine recommends that calories do not come from more than 20 to 35 percent of fat. (Ref. 2.) By learning to read nutritional labels and by following a healthy diet, calculating calories for your optimal weight can be easy and fun.

Things You'll Need

• Calculator
• Book containing information on calories in food
• Small food scale

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Instructions

How to Calculate Total Calories in Ones Diet

• 1

  Calculate the amount of calories that your body needs. You can do this by visiting the American Heart Association's web site (www.myfatstranslator.com), which has a helpful tool to calculate your daily caloric needs. For example, through this tool a sedentary woman who is age 30 years old, 5'3" tall, and weighs 145 lbs., is advised to consume 1,990 calories per day to maintain her current weight. (Ref. 1.)

• 2

  Devise a diet plan based on the amount of calories your body needs. You may choose a plan based on three meals per day or more. Make a list of the foods you wish to eat and find the calories of each food per serving on the nutritional labels. If you are aiming to eat a total of 1,800 calories a day, you can divide these calories evenly among meals and snacks. For example, breakfast, lunch and dinner can each contain a total of 500 calories, leaving a 300-calorie allotment for snacks.

• 3

  Learn how to read food labels. This is a vital part of keeping track of the calories in your diet. On the back of most food packages, there will be a nutritional label stating the amount of calories per serving. Make sure to consume only the recommended serving size. If you wish to eat more than one serving, multiply the number of servings you eat by the number of calories in each serving.

• 4

  Purchase a food scale to weigh foods such as fish or chicken, which usually don't come with a nutrition label. Visit fitday.com for a list of foods and their calories. After you learn the calories per ounce of a certain food, multiply that number by the ounces you have consumed to find the total amount of calories in that food.