A calorie counter is an easy way to keep track of your daily food intake. It can help you find the number of calories in the foods you eat, as well as the total calories you've consumed and burned throughout the day.

Some tools like the Calorie Counter allow you to look up the nutritional content of certain foods. For example, if you click on "bananas," it will tell you that one medium-sized banana contains 105 calories, 14.4 grams of sugar and 27 grams of carbs.

Other more detailed online calorie trackers such as MyDietJournal, My Calorie Counter and FitWatch allow you to establish a daily food diary. After creating an account, you input everything you eat or drink throughout the day from a pre-set list and the serving size. The calorie tracker summarizes total calories, as well as total carbs, sugar, protein, salt and fat consumed each day. Some will even allow you to enter your weight-loss goal and tells you how many calories you should be consuming and how close to that limit you are after each meal.

There are also calorie trackers as part of complete weight-loss programs such as Calorie King or Weight Watchers.

More Diet Questions Answered:
How Many Calories Do I Need?
How Much Protein Do I Need?
How Many Carbs Per Day Do I Need?

Celebrity dietitian and motivational life coach Tanya Zuckerbrot, author of www.ffactordiet.com and founder of www.skinnyandthecity.com, has helped thousands of people lose weight and keep it off with her program. Her philosophy? Tanya believes you should never sacrifice taste, even when you're eating healthy foods.

Dining out should be a leisurely activity. If you are on a diet, do not stress at the glance of a menu. Follow these simple suggestions, and you can enjoy eating out without sabotaging your diet.

If you eat bread, dessert and have a few glasses of wine during dinner, you could be consuming up to 1,000 extra calories at your meal -- that's not even counting the appetizer and main course! Lets face it, who stops at just one dinner roll? At around 120 calories a pop and another 130 calories for a dip or two of olive oil, the calories add up quickly. In addition, most people have at least two glasses of wine at dinner (approximately 90 calories per glass). If you give in to the temptation of dessert, it could cost you anywhere from 200 to 600 calories. This is a dieter's nightmare!

Because I dine out often, I have learned to choose my poison, so to speak. Rather than go all-out and reach for the bread basket, a glass of wine and dessert, I choose one. I always tell my patients to order a soup (non-cream based) or garden salad with dressing on the side as an appetizer -- this way they won't be tempted by the bread. And, if you choose a decadent dessert, just a few bites should suffice. I call it the three-bite rule; it's all you need to feel satisfied. After all, you shouldn't be eating dessert out of hunger, it's all about the flavor. The first three bites are the most flavorful and will satisfy your sweet tooth. If you choose alcohol, it does not mean you need to binge drink. Have one or two glasses of wine or vodka with club soda, and you will be able to take the edge off with few calories. By following these simple rules, you can cut around 800 calories from your next dinner!

Think calories don't count? Think again, because they do.

If you're counting calories, you're probably just concerned about the number. If you are keeping a meal under 250 calories, it doesn't matter whether you get those 250 calories from a big bowl of steamed veggies or a sliver of cheesecake (other than the fact that getting your nutrition from cheesecake isn't good for your overall health), right? Not necessarily.

According to Diet Blog, some researchers are saying that's not the case, and some calories are more likely to become fat than others. Basically, sugary treats cause your blood glucose levels to spike, which makes your body release more insulin. And, some experts say that "controlling insulin secretion is the key to losing weight."

I know -- this means that substituting Christmas cookies for a nutritious dinner, even if the calories are equal, is a bad idea. And for that, I'm sorry. But hey, anything I can do to help you avoid a little seasonal weight gain is a good thing, right? So make sure you're not just counting calories, but counting the right calories.

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Welcome to Walking the Walk, a feature that takes a deeper look at commonly shared diet and fitness advice. Every other week, I'll choose one piece of advice and practice it for seven days. Then I'll report back on what I discovered about making it work in real life and how it affected my own personal fitness -- and how it ultimately can affect your own efforts.

Part of my incentive for Walking the Walk is to better my personal health, and that includes weight loss. I'm already on the road, but I've got plenty of work to do. Being at home all day -- I'm a work-from-home mom -- makes it a little harder for me. I've got 24-hour access to my refrigerator, and it's easy to find myself grazing when I'm not really hungry.

Counting calories might seem old-fashioned, but balancing calories in/calories out is key to maintaining or losing weight. Limiting calories is only one half of the equation, of course; exercise is essential too. This week, I'll count calories every day, recording them in a notebook on my kitchen counter.

Here's the disclaimer: I plan on doing a doctor-approved 1500 calories a day, which works for me at my weight and current activity level. This should get me to my goal weight, losing 1-2 pounds a week. Your mileage may vary. So if you decide to count calories at home, be sure to see some of the basic calculators in the Making it Work For You section of this post to determine how many calories you should be eating every day.

Day 1: By lunch today, I've hit 800 calories. Though I have plenty left to get me through the day, I feel a little flutter of panic, not unlike my college days when my student loan money was always at risk of running out before the semester ended. OK, maybe not exactly like that, but what if some big emergency happens, like say, a double fudge brownie?

I think this is what they call an "a-ha moment." By learning how many calories are in the foods I eat, I can regulate how much I eat and therefore lose weight. Still, I can't help but look at my allowed calories column get smaller and feel a little nervous.

Day 3: I was shocked this afternoon to discover that a mere 11 tortilla chips equals 180 calories. No wonder I was having trouble taking off the weight, because I was eating way more than 11 chips at a time. I didn't count, and I ate them right out of the bag -- a recipe for caloric disaster. That puts this snack over the allotted 300 calories I've given myself for snacks, so I count out five chips and measure out my hummus. I'm totally satisfied, though, so that's a good thing.

This is definitely incentive to eat my favorite afternoon snack with cucumbers and bell peppers instead of chips. Better nutrition, and way more food!

Day 5: So what does 1500 calories look like? At my house, something like this:

Breakfast:
2 eggs, scrambled with 1/2 red bell pepper -- 230 calories
OR
Oatmeal, milk, and blueberries -- 250 calories

Snack:
Carrots and hummus -- 150 calories
OR
Apple and peanut butter -- 290 calories

Lunch:
7 oz. tuna on a bed of salad greens with a tiny bit of my favorite (sinful) salad dressing -- 290 calories
OR
A frozen low-calorie entree (like Lean Cuisine) with a small side salad -- 450 calories

Snack:
Kashi Pumpkin Spice Flax bar -- 140 calories
OR
A piece of fruit and a small handful of nuts -- 230 calories

Dinner:
Baked salmon with dill sauce, whole wheat couscous, dinner salad with garden veggies -- 600 calories
OR
Homemade pesto on whole wheat pasta -- 500 calories

And if I have calories left over, I enjoy an evening snack!

Day 7: You know what? I've decided to quit counting calories when it comes to non-starchy vegetables. The calorie content is negligible at best. Take the following foods, for instance:

• 1 cup of broccoli -- 40 calories
• 1 cup of cauliflower -- 48 calories
• 3 stalks of celery -- nine calories ... I mean, come on. Is that worth writing down?
• 1 cup Swiss chard -- 32 calories
• cucumber -- 30 calories, for the whole thing!
• 1 cup eggplant -- 38 calories
  
  

You get the idea. These foods are jam-packed with nutrition and carry little weight when it comes to calories, so to make my life simpler, I've decided not to write them down. Will it make a difference in my weight loss? In the long run, I doubt it. This is about teaching myself life long healthy habits, not about obsessively tracking every last calorie.

The best way to figure out how many calories you need to eat in a day is to know how many you're burning. Aside from your daily workouts and activity, your body burns calories just going through its daily processes. This is called BMR, and you can figure out what yours is here.

Once you know your BMR, then you can figure out what your daily caloric need is. Once you know how many calories you need to eat to maintain your weight, you can choose to eat fewer calories or burn more calories through exercise to lose weight.

To lose a pound, you need to burn 3500 calories. So if you subtract 500 calories from your diet every day, you should lose one pound a week. Exercise will speed up the process, of course, and you can figure out how many calories you've burned using this handy calculator.

Everyone has different calorie needs based on their weight and activity level. It's generally accepted by health experts, however, that no one should eat less than 1,200 calories a day. Though it's motivating to lose weight quickly, it can be harmful to your health. You'll lose muscle mass along with fat, and when you put the weight back on (and you will put it back on if you crash-diet), you'll put on fat, leaving you worse off than you were before.

Counting calories is only one part of a successful weight loss effort, but it can be an educational experience that can help you shape your healthy eating habits for the long haul. If you decide to count calories, be sure to check out our How Many Calories? feature here at That's Fit. In addition, there are several sites on the web that you can use to look up the calorie content of certain foods, like Calorie-Count, The Calorie Counter, and My-Calorie-Counter, among others.

Do you count calories? What kinds of tips and tricks can you share with our readers to make this healthy habit stick?

Got a Walking the Walk idea you'd like to see Bethany try for seven days? Share it with us in comments!

It's time to decide -- is this a healthy habit that can be realistically worked into day-to-day life?

• Piece of cake! I can definitely work this into my daily routine.
• Not my cup of tea. This is harder than I imagined. Still, I plan to stick with it and do my best.
• Nuts! This seems nearly impossible to keep up. But I'll definitely do it whenever possible.

Counting calories is not my cup of tea. If I wasn't working so hard at weight loss, I wouldn't do it. It's tedious and boring, honestly. BUT, and this is a pretty big but, it definitely helped me stay on track this week. Not only was I able to stick to my goal and lose 2.5 pounds(!), but it also taught me about making good food choices. I know which foods give me more volume for fewer calories, and by eyeballing my portions (I'm not a measure-your-food kind of girl), I'm learning more about appropriate portion sizes.

So until I hit my goal weight, I'll be counting calories. But I suspect that as time goes on, it will be far more of a mental thing and less look-it-up and write it down tactic.

Keeping a food diary is a proven way to help people take off the weight, teaching portion control and accountability. Though you can buy a food journal online, you don't need to, and a pre-made food diary won't be customized to your unique needs. Instead, why not try making one yourself?

About.com has some simple instructions for making your own food journal, including pages that you can print out and put into a three-ring binder. BBC also has printable pages that you can use to make your own food diary. And Celiac Travel has some examples of a homemade food diary done on Excel (though hers is for food allergies, not weight loss).

One thing to keep in mind when you start tracking your intake is that less is more. It's a big commitment, writing down everything you eat, so pick just one or two things to start. For instance, maybe you want to count calories or track your fruit and vegetable servings. As you get more experience, your tracking will become more sophisticated, and soon you'll be tracking "pounds lost" as well!

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Losing weight can be a tricky business. Despite all the fancy programs and diet claims, weight loss boils down to one thing: burning more calories than you consume. But if you're not careful, you may be consuming more calories than your realize.

Counting calories seems so hopelessly 1980's, though, doesn't it? And, let's face it, tracking every calorie is a bit of a pain. But a food diary doesn't have to be an obsessive tabulation of every little thing -- it's merely a way for you to ensure you're getting a balanced, nutritious diet in the range of calories you want to consume.

It's a habit that is well worth the effort. A Kaiser Permanente Center for Health Research study found that participants who kept a food diary lost almost twice as much weight as those who didn't.

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Do calories always count? Of course they do. It's an unfortunate, though entirely unassailable, truth -- every calorie always counts. Well, it's unfortunate when we're talking about consuming calories, anyway. As for burning them, I think we can all agree that every single damn calorie we burn better count!!

Since we're in agreement on caloric expenditure, let's turn our attention back to caloric consumption. For a second time I ask the question: Do calories always count? We decided before that they do. But what about extenuating circumstances, like birthdays and holidays? Do they still count then? Obviously they still do, but we tend to be far more lax in those types of situations, causing us to trick ourselves into thinking that they don't.

Women's Health explores this calorie counting situation of a different kind in their current issue. Citing a survey of over 1,000 women, here's a quick look at what they found:

• 55 percent of women said that calories don't count during celebrations
• 39 percent of women said that calories don't count when traveling
  
• 30 percent of women said that calories don't count when eating on the go
• 27 percent of women said that calories don't count when eating at a buffet

I'm quite sure the respondants of this survey were well aware that these calories do count. But, it's still interesting to see how certain events or situations can serve as a means of neutralization.

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Keep a food diary for a couple weeks and you'll learn way more than calories consumed. If you're having trouble losing weight, DietBlog offers six ways a food diary can keep your food consumption accurate and honest:

• Account for those little extras: This is definitely my problem. I'll eat three healthy squares, but screw up in between. A food diary will keep you honest.
• Treat time!: Diets fail when there's no fun. Tracking calories can also reveal times when you can enjoy a guilt-free treat.
• When do you eat?: A food diary can reveal your danger zones -- moments in the day when you tend to overeat. For me, that's around 4:00 pm. I need more protein at lunch.
• No 'portion creep': If the pounds are creeping back on, portion creep may be to blame. Time to weigh your foods and record it all in your diary.
• Habits a changin': Flip around your food diary for motivation. If you're struggling, take a look at what you ate during a perfect week. If you've been on a roll, look at a bad day to visually congratulate yourself on how your nutrition has improved.
• Self-Control: Let's face it, keeping a food diary makes you face the music every time you pop something in your mouth. It's more than a calorie-counter, it can be a real self-control booster, too.

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Calorie. When you're trying to lose weight those three little syllables can sound a bit sinister. But calories really aren't the bad guys. Basically, a calorie is just a unit of energy. They give us the fuel we need to keep going. But did you know that when you cut calories you can actually boost your energy? Since calories are our main source of energy, it may seem counterintuitive that reducing them can boost our energy. But the trick -- even though a calorie, is a calorie, is a calorie -- is eating high quality foods that benefit your body.

When you aren't eating healthfully, you're likely to get extra calories from refined carbs (sugary foods, white bread/pasta/rice, etc.) and greasy foods. Those are choices that pack a hefty calorie punch and (though you may get an initial rush from sugar) ultimately leave you feeling sluggish. Slow-burning, healthful foods will keep your blood sugar stable and keep you energized throughout the day.

Whole-grains, fruits, vegetables, and lean protein are all good choices for energy-boosting foods. Some top picks include:

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