Free Online Calorie Counter & Burn Meter

New Year's Resolutions often include weight loss or fitness. These programs can often be very expensive.  An older lady in my neighborhood has lost quite a bit of weight and she recommended this website to me.  It offers a free online calorie counting service, but there is also a lot more to it. I have never done Weight Watchers (or other diet programs) before, but I did have a friend tell me that strict calorie counting is part of most plans. 

I like this website because you can do it however you want and it is up to you how strict you want to be. In addition to caloric intake, it also tracks your burn for the day.  You can look at it and quickly see if you need to limit your calorie intake or simply increase your burn. You can also tell it that you want "weight maintenance" or that your goal is "weight gain."  Then it will make some caloric intake recommendations for you.  But you can also type in what activities you participated in for the day and it will tell you how many calories you burned. These activities range from running, swimming, moving furniture and vigorous cleaning to lighter activities such as hairstyling, folding laundry, reading and even sleeping, if you want to get that specific. 

NOTE: For those of you used to a metric system, you can enter your items in grams, pints, etc. instead of cups, tablespoons, etc. There is also a unit converter.

You can tag the items that you do on a regular basis. For example, if you eat a certain oatmeal every day for breakfast, you just tag it and then you don't have to enter the info every time. 

Another thing I like is that it has a large database of nutritional information that is quite specific. There are over 107,000 foods. (And if that's not enough for you, you can also create custom food information if you can't find what you need.) For example, you can type "Pizza Hut pepperoni pizza", and the nutrional choices will come up for various pizza sizes and crust choices, etc.  Then you can simply adjust how much you consumed and add it to your food log. The woman who recommended it to me said that she keeps the calorie counter open on her computer all the time, and then she just forces herself to be brutally honest about what she is eating. 

You can take a quiz about your diet profile; you can read articles about various topics; you can join forums and keep a journal if you want to.  You can track your weight and it will give you graph telling you if you are on target for your goal.  It will give you a graph of your nutrition that shows what percent of your food was fat, carbohydrates, sodium, etc.  You will receive a letter grade for your nutrition and most foods have a letter grade next to them.  For example, a Pizza Hut medium-sized Pepperoni Lover's pizza gets a D+ on the nutrition scale. Hmm... perhaps not the best choice for dinner, eh? 

You can even track stuff on your phone.  Let's say you are sitting in a restaurant and you want to get some nutritional info.  You can. You can text them and they will send it back to you, or if you have a web-enabled phone, you can access it that way.  They also have recipes you can try. There's even a recipe anaylzer. You enter your recipe and the number of servings and it will provide you with some nutritional information.

Anyway, just passing on a free tool that you may want to try if weight/fitness are part of your goals for the new year.  Certainly there are many, many calculators out there, and this is only one of them. I have liked it so far, and I hope to stick with it. For me, it has been more about realizing the nutrition of certain foods that I have never thought much about before.  Then when I am faced with those foods, I can decide if it is really worth it to eat it. If I want to, then I do. And I alter what I am eating for the rest of the day, or I increase my burn to make up for it. I guess it's simply creating an awareness for me. It's helping me make healthier choices. It's helping me realize that I need to get my body moving more.  I guess it's something about seeing what you ate and did that day facing you in black and white (and of course, color graphics! lol)   It's kind of a wake up call. 

Click here for a great article about making New Year's Resolutions stick.

Good luck with your goals for the new year!! If you want to share what your goals are, comment below. (They can be anything-- not just fitness/dieting).  Please include the tools or methods you plan to use to achieve them if you can, and if possible, how you are doing it frugally. We can all benefit that way. I always love hearing how others are saving money. Thanks!