by Arjun Wadhwa

Created on: December 28, 2008

Counting calories is not as tough as it used to be. With internet, search engines, and books counting calories has become accurate, easy and a reliable indicator of weight loss.

There are many things which you can do to make the calorie counting much easier and faster. Some ways to make calorie counting easier is to:

* Use a calorie calculator: A calorie calculator provides the portion and the number of calories in the food. Calorie calculator also tells how many calories come from fat, carbohydrates, proteins and vitamins. This is by far the fastest way to count calories, especially for food items which don't have a nutrition chart.

* Read labels: In Canada law requires food items to have a nutritional chart which contains information about the number of calories. Many people overlook this chart, but this chart contains a lot of important information such ass amounts of fats and nutrition.

Some labels can be misleading, as they are less in calories but high in fats. A good rule of thumb is to multiply the number of calories by 2 if the fat percentage is over 35%. Many foods have a lot of calories but a lot of nutrition as well. Also, some labels provide information based on 2,000 calorie diet or information for 150 pound woman. Your calories depend on many calories, but the chart does give a rough estimate of how many calories there are in the food.

* Eat proportion meals: To make calorie counting easier, another good way is to eat six measured meals everyday. By measured, it is meant that the calories are pre determined and each meal has the same number of calories. So you don't have to count every single day.

There are meals available in many diets or grocery store which can be eaten everyday and have accurate calorie count. This makes the process of calorie counting easier.

* Estimates: This method is used by most people. Estimation of calories in most cases provides sufficient information about foods. After you have read all those nutritional information, you should be able to tell the number of calories in various foods without having to look at a calorie chart.

For example, an apple has approximately 50-60 calories. This is an estimate since apples do not have fats, but contain sugars. A scoop of ice cream is approximately 150 calories. Ice creams have fats and sugars making them over 100 calories.

Estimation works best if you have read the labels for the food before, but the brand is different or the portion is larger or smaller.

These were some of the ways to count calories in fast and orderly manner.

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