Introducing Our New Calorie Counter
How do you use our Calorie Counter?
It’s simple to use: you input the type of food and quantities you have consumed in a day as accurately as you can and let the counter add up the total calories you have consumed. If you use our BMR calculator you can calculate how many calories your body needs in a day and therefore workout if you are consuming too many calories or not enough. Pretty simple and very useful I think you will agree?
What makes our Calorie Counter different?
We don’t like the idea of calorie counting so you may wonder why we have developed a Calorie Counter. Counting calories is a good way to monitor your calorie intake but it is only a very small part of what your body requires. For example what about all the vitamins and minerals? What about your 5 a day? Wouldn’t it be great if there was a counter for all nutrients? Wouldn’t it be great if you could add up all the nutrients you consume in a day? That is exactly what we have done. Not only do you get the total of all your calorie consumption but also the total of all minerals, vitamins and other nutrients you have eaten.
What is the point?
Not only has our calculator been able to add all your nutrients up but it is also able to compare it against your Daily Reference Intake (DRI). The DRI is the recommended levels you should be consuming for your age and gender. Having this information will let you see which nutrients you have too much of and also those you are deficient in.
If we don’t have enough of a particular nutrient you can find that many symptoms can take hold from simple lack of energy to a serious diseases. By increasing the nutrients you lack you can give your body the best possible chance to fight illness and live a full healthy life. If you have an excess of any nutrient it can have nasty side effects. To much fat, salt and calories can lead to heart disease but they are not alone in nutrients that can cause harm if you overdo them.
Food Diary
Visit Beeble Diet and you will be taken to the diet home page. You will notice on the left that there is a Food Diary section. This is like your shopping basket that you would get on any online shop. The difference is that this will list the foods that you have consumed.
How do you add your foods?
First you have to find the food you want to add to your Food Diary. To do this you can either enter your food name into the quick search box on the right, or for a more accurate search you can use the Food Search link on the left-hand sidebar. This will take you to a page where you can pick a category that you would associate with your food and the food name. When you click on “Go” you will be taken to a list of foods that match your criteria. Scroll through them until you find your food and you will be taken to the food values page.
Food Values Page
On this page you will be shown a list of all nutrients that your chosen food contains. The default weight is 100 grams, if you need to change the weight pick the quantity type from the drop down menu just above the nutrient contents. Then in the box to the left add the quantity and click on “Go”. This will now adjust all the nutritional values for your selected weight (clever eh? – Beeble).
Now you have your chosen food and the correct weight, all you need to do is add it to your diary and you do this by clicking on the “Add to Diary” button at the top of the page. This immediately adds the food to your food diary and takes you back to the search page so that you can enter your next food. Keep repeating this until you have entered all the foods you have had in a day.
All foods entered?
Once you have entered all your foods you should see a nice long list under “Food Diary” that contains all the foods you have entered and the weights you have chosen for each. Under the “Food Dairy” section there is a link to “Food Basket”. Click on it and you will be taken to your food basket where you can make some changes to your weights or remove any incorrect choices. After you have made your weight changes make sure you click the update button at the bottom of the page.
DRI results
Once you have been through your list and you are happy that it is a good representation of what you eat, you can click on the link at the bottom of the “Food Basket” page entitled “Go to your DRI”. By clicking on this you send all your foods through our calculator which very quickly and without any complaining gets your results for you.
On the “Your Daily Reference Intake” page you will see that the default setting is for a male aged 31 to 50 years old. If you don’t fit that description do not worry just use the drop down menus below to pick the category that is right for you and click on “Update”. Once clicked it will rework all the percentages to personalise it for you. Now if you scroll down the page you will be able to see each nutrient, how much you have consumed of it and that as a percentage of your DRI.
What to do with the results
Well, these results are knowledge and with knowledge you can make educated choices. You can make changes to your diet that are personalised and will make a real difference. Unlike following a diet that has no idea who you are and therefore comes out with a generic plan for you to follow, our results take on board exactly what you are consuming and allow you to make choices on the ways you can make changes to your diet. When you come across a nutrient you are having too much of or not enough of, just click on the name of the nutrient and it will show you the top 100 foods that contain that nutrient per 100 grams. This will allow you to find food you can add to your diet to improve the intake of a particular nutrient or if you are having too much you will have a list of 100 foods to cut back on or to avoid 
With our Calorie Counter you now have no excuse to eat badly and pretend you thought that four doughnuts a day was building up your muscles nicely: get calculating, work out that healthy diet and really get fit!
October 26th, 2009 at 11:01 pm
If you just did a food diet alone, you will lose weight but if you add exercise to it, you will lose weight almose twice as fast.
I’m just talking from personal experience.