Calorie Counter and Counting Calories

So many new diet programs and books hit the market every year, it might be tempting to assume that dieting is a complicated thing, and in some ways it is. But in other ways dieting is really very simple: it's all about burning more calories than you consume. Since calories represent the amount of energy in the foods you eat, burning more calories than you eat just means that your body has to find the energy somewhere else-by burning fat.

There are two obstacles that make this simple formula more difficult to follow. First, it is hard to find out how many calories are in certain foods. Second, it gets confusing to keep track of all of those calories.

The solution to both problems is a calorie counter. The old version of this was a book that listed the information on different foods and a chart that you filled out for every day. Now, you can do the same thing online with websites that have the information on foods you ate and keep track of your total for you. Even more conveniently, there are now mobile devices that make all of the nutritional information portable and let you enter your meals wherever you go. The most advanced can also be linked to your home computer.

Quite simply, calorie counters bring convenience to the most fundamental part of dieting-counting calories so that you can decrease your intake. Here are a few sites with more information about counting calories.

Links

caloriecount.about.com - This site is very easy to use with lots of helpful tools. You can enter the foods you have eaten to find out how many calories they contain, or enter your exercise to find out how many calories you burned. If you create a free user account, you can also keep track of your calories and even benefit from comparing notes with other dieters in the community.

calorieking.com - This site has even more information and a solid scientific foundation. The site is also very easy to use. The biggest difference from other calorie counting sites is that you have to pay a fee after the 7 day free trial. If you're serious about counting calories, this fee is probably worth it to you for two reasons. First, the site is one of the clearest and most helpful. Second, spending money on something like this can help you feel even more committed to using it. After all, calorie counting won't help you any if you don't keep up with it.