How do you keep a track of your calorie intake?

[user1000000000001]

I just went to add my daily food to Nutracheck but you can only add 5 items in a day. That won't be enough.

What do others do?

Do you use a pay app to help count your calories, roughy guess / mental note, write it all down pen and paper style or something else?

A free app would probably be my preferred option if anyone knows if one that is quite intuitive and easy to use.

Thanks

I just use a pen and keep track in my diary.

Yes, it does. I had it set up to talk to my Fitbit.

Nutracheck gives a lot of people the same amount of calories. Use either a Tdee calculator or go onto James smith website to get an amount more suited to you. It can then be changed manually on nutracheck

It does; I've turned it off though so it stopped talking to my Apple Watch. Devices overestimate your caloric burn by anywhere from 30-90%, depending on what exercise you do, how long you've been doing it (overall, not in a single session), and how much personal info you've put into it.

It's in "Exercise" under "Settings" if you want to do it though.

Cronometer is great, you can add your custom recipes and foods/supplements as well as record exercise, weight and other biometrics. All free.

Another Cronometer fan!! I absolutely hated how few of my food items were listed in MFP, hated how many mistakes the entries had, hated entering recipes.
I paid for my Cronometer subscription well worth the accuracy.

My fitness Pal. It's free, uses a lot of branded items and even restaurant servings. Lots of motivation from the forums.
Only thing is ignore the exercise calories - it waaaay overestimates how much calories you burn.

Underestimates but will stop at 1200 because it isn't allowed to go any lower. If you know your basal metabolic rate (BMR) - calories you burn doing nothing but existing, this is your maintenance rate. Anything lower than that you're in a deficit. The bigger the deficit the bigger the weight loss but also arguably the less sustainable and more miserable! Sorry if you knew all this, not trying to teach anyone to suck eggs but a lot of people will just blindly follow an app and end up under eating, hungry and giving up

I've just looked up my maintenance calories and it's over 2000. This explains why I feel faint when I follow MFP recommendations. It makes sense as well - I'm a tall, active woman.

So you could eat 1500-1600 a day (sitting on your arse although I wouldn't recommend it) and potentially still go on to lose around 1lb a week roughly

i found MFP routinely underestimated the calories on certain foods and worse allows members (random people) to input into the database.
honestly cooked lean ground beef shouldn't be that hard to figure out but on MFP it did my head in.

My fitness pal

Sounds like it's pretty much between my fitness pal and Nutracheck.

I though there would be a really wide range of options.

I know someone else had mentioned Noom and thought that may have come up a bit more.

I think it's going to have to be Nutracheck and it is only £1 a week. Worth it for what I'm trying to do.

If you subscribe you can add as many as you like. Also you can calorie count your own recipes and add portions to your day, and there's a forum.

Haha....... me too!!

If I'm not sure about how many calories a certain food has it, I Google it and add it to my list.

My method probably isn't totally accurate but it works for me.

Just having to write everything down keeps me on the straight and narrow. Most of the time, anyway...

I weigh my food and add it to a cumulative total.

I have weekly sheet divided into days.

If I'm not sure of the calories I ask my Google speaker how many calories in 100gms. It's been good for my maths!

Sounds high but depends how tall you are etc

Macrofactor. It works out your actual expenditure based on weight and calories in and recommends calorie and macro targets according to your goals. It does not "tell you off" for not following the targets, just recalibrates each week. You have to pay but I think it's worth it and I was actually quite happy just bunging everything on a spreadsheet for years.

I dont think its helpful at all to comment on whether an amount of calories sounds high/low, when you don't have any other information to go on. That sort of comment can give rise to disordered eating.

E.g. I'm a tall woman, and 1600 calories would lead to pretty rapid weight loss for me, even without exercise.