You might believe that everyone needs the same foods, in roughly the same amounts, to be healthy after reading a food label. Not so! The foods we eat should be consistent with the diverse bodies, objectives, and lifestyles that each of us has.

With the aid of this calorie counter, you can determine how many calories you should aim to consume each day in order to gain muscle, lose weight, or keep your present weight. This might be your springboard for greater nutritional control and better outcomes as you move toward your objectives!

While many people may maintain a good body composition without ever calculating calories, it is quite beneficial for many others.

Advantages of calorie-focused nutrition:

• Enables you to contrast various dishes and meals
• Gives you a measurement of portions that is objective.
• Show how splurging on little things, like a daily Coke, can mount up over time.

Disadvantages of calorie-focused nutrition:

• Doesn't take food quality into account
• It can be tempting to cut too many calories, too fast
• Food labels aren't necessarily accurate

You can do this using food labels, as well as by weighing out your food and using one of the many online nutritional databases.

Weighing food may seem like a lot of counting and not much fun, but it gets easier over time. Fitness coach Vince Del Monte says in the article, "From Here to Macros: 4 Steps to Better Nutrition" that you quickly learn to "eyeball" quantities of both calories and macronutrients after just a few weeks of practice.

Nearly never are calorie counts completely accurate. But if you get one important detail right—the serving size—they can really be rather close.

When examining a nutrition label, start by examining the serving size. The basis for the material that follows is that. Although it's sometimes simply a modest amount, serving sizes may correspond to a full box or bottle of the product.

Sounds academic? It isn't. In the article "5 Sneaky Culprits of Weight Gain," dietitian Sara-Jane McShane notes that serving size is an evaluation of the typical portion that a person eats, and it's not always a reliable one. If you consume a cup of a product with a serving size of half a cup, all the nutritional data—calories, protein, carbohydrates, salt, fat, and everything else—will be doubled.

This is essential information if you want your calorie counts to be reliable! Not into doing complicated math? Then maybe pre-portioned foods like tuna fish, protein bars, or packaged nuts are a good choice for you. These sorts of calorie-counting hacks can be lifesavers!

One more "secret" that's increasingly well-known: eat enough protein! A major study in 2018 found that as long as your calories are under control and you're eating enough protein, different weight-loss diets work with about the same degree of effectiveness.