calorie calculating website

CalorieKing.com

I've used the "Lose It!" app for, well, losing it (body weight). It has long been recommended that to lose weight, you should log all the food you eat. Well, "there's an app for that" now. It works. And in addition to making me more conscious of how much that cookie or slice of pizza blows my daily budget, there is also a video-game, playing-to-win aspect of it in which I give myself strokes for a smaller portion or longer hike that "wins" by coming in under budget that day.

But back to the original question: there are thousands of store-bought foods in the database, including basic ingredients like olive oil, cornmeal, carrots, white enriched flour, rice flour, brown rice flour, all-purpose flour, etc. So you could calculate the calories of any recipe. I haven't used that function, but it will let you assemble custom foods and meals from its database or your own entries.

I see so many people on the trail, finishing every trip with so much extra food. If they tracked the calories packed per day and per mile) and adjusted accordingly, they could quickly fine-tune their packed food to have no extra. This whole "bring an extra day worth of food"?!? Who among us couldn't stand to lose a pound of fat?

That would another way to use that app because it calculates the calories consumed from (1) basal metabolism for your gender and body weight and (2) the additional calories consumed per hour of hiking (general / backpacking / mountain climbing) or walking (2, 2.5, 3, 3.5, 4, 4.5, 5 mph) although I wish they had an option of XX horizontal miles plus YY vertical feet with ZZ pounds on your back. As a first cut, you could plug your body+pack weight in as your body weight and 7 hour of 3 mpg walking for a 21-mile day and see how many calories you'd burn that day. You should pack that many calories for a long, thru hike, but for a hike of a week or two, you can be 500, 1000, even 2000 calories per day under your expenditures and lose a few pounds each week of your hike.

Dehydrating doesn't change the calories in the food, it just removes the water. So calculate the original food at its original weight, or use its dried weight and dried calories/weight.

Here's another good one:

http://nutritiondata.self.com

I use http://www.SparkPeople.com to create my meal plans from and recipes. If the item I want to use is not in their data base, I add it. The web site will do much, much more but it can easily be used to count and calculate calories and give you the information on how to balance the meal with regards to protein, carbohydrates and fats.

I use cronometer, for its intended reason ;) But obviously up the calories when hiking.

I have actually used most of these from one time to another. I do not find them friendly for recipes using real foods; most of them seem to be adapted to processed foods. One website didn't have a logged calorie count for cooked cabbage, but it had the calorie count for steamed skunk cabbage, for goodness sake! Also, if I'm creating a recipe from freeze dried chicken, dried spinach, carrots, corn, tomatoes, and quinoa, if I use the amounts of dried ingredients, and the calculator is set up for wet ingredients, trying to figure out equivalents of what the ingredients would be wet to get the calories right is annoying. Generally, I'm using dried ingredients from PackIt Gourmet and individual ingredients, then putting them together in freezer bags.

Can you trust the calorie counts entered by other users, if there's no label attached for the consumer to read from?

I try to only use usda data, and most of the time it works well I guess mostly because we eat many things raw. But even cooked things appear fairly plentiful there, with a little approximation if necessary (for example poached salmon – moist cooked salmon – steamed salmon, kind of similar)

I admit I don't trust data from recipes compiled and prepared by others, just go by original ingredients which are in usda.