Making Calorie Counting Simpler

It can be tiresome and time consuming to log each and every food item that you eat. Here is a quick thing that I found can help make this a quicker process.

Group food items together that you normally eat at the same time. For instance, everyday for lunch I eat a similar sandwich. It contains bread, cheese, and sliced meat. To speed up my logging process I add up the number of calories for the sandwich and then record it under the item "sandwich".

In this way I don't have three items to record, just one. You can expand this into meals you normally consume, cereal and milk is another good example. Remember to recalculate the total if you change any of the ingredients by a significant amount of calories.

In order for this to work for most people, including myself, calorie counting needs to be as quick and painless as possible from day to day. The more complicated things get the less likely we are to follow it for long periods of time.

For me, I tend to have a pretty regimented diet from one day to the next, especially during the week. I have structured my breakfast and lunch to include around 1000 calories. By doing this I know approximately what I have consumed by the time I get home for dinner. So if I don't have time to add things up as I go through the day I will at least have a ballpark figure which will help me determine what portions I should eat for dinner.