How does Calorielookup work?

Using CalorieLookup is very simple. If you just want to quickly look up how many calories are in a certain food, or estimate how many calories you burn from a certain exercise, you can look those up using the food diary or the exercise diary. However, CalorieLookup works best if you create an account. If you create an account your diary entries are automatically saved, you can access your diaries from any computer, CalorieLookup will be able to estimate how many calories total you burn in a day of normal activity, you can enter and save calorie information for the specific foods that you eat, and you'll be able to create a report that lets you know if you've been burning more calories then you've been eating over the previous week.

What are the benefits of signing up for an account?

• Your diary entries are automatically saved.
• You can access your diaries from any computer.
• You will be able to enter, edit, and tag foods, allowing you to tailor Calorilookup to your own needs.
• Calorielookup will be able to estimate how many calories you burn on a typical day (known as Basal Metabolic Rate, or BMR).
• You can keep track of your weight to track progress over time.
• You can view reports that tell you if you've been burning more calories than you've been eating over the last week.

How do I track calories using CalorieLookup?

After you create an account, each day use the food diary to enter all of the foods that you have eaten that day. This will provide an estimate for how many total calories you consumed that day. Do the same thing each day for the exercise you get each day using the exercise diary. You'll notice that you BMR is estimated for you automatically based on the information that you provided when you created your account.

What Should I do if CalorieLookup Doesn't Find a Certain Food?

You can just enter the information for the food into CalorieLookup, if you have created an account and are signed in. If you have a food label, you can use the new food form to copy the food information from the label. Otherwise, you can enter the ingredients from a recipe using the new recipe form.

Where does CalorieLookup get it's Calorie Information?

Calorie information comes from all the CalorieLookup users working together cooperatively. Most likely, the foods that you eat are already in CalorieLookup. However, if they are not, you can just enter the information by copying it from a food label, or entering the recipe information.When you enter the calorie information for a food you like, all the other CalorieLookup users can use that information. Users can even correct and edit food label information for each other, which helps keep that information accurate and up to date. Users have requested not to let other users edit the recipes they entered, because they are more personal than food label information. So while other users can use recipes that you have entered for their food diaries, users can't edit each others recipes.

CalorieLookup uses straight forward and publicly available data and formulas. CalorieLookup gets some of the data about calories in foods from the USDA (U.S. Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Research Service. 2005. USDA Nutrient Database for Standard Reference, Release 18). Information about calories burned in exercise is from Pollock, M.L. Health and Fitness through Physical Activity. John Wiley & Sons. 1978. For the basal metabolic rate (BMR), we use the Harris/Benedict formula (Harris J, Benedict F (1918). "A Biometric Study of Human Basal Metabolism.". Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 4 (12): 370-3. PMID 16576330).

How many foods and recipes are in the CalorieLookup database?

As of this moment there are 12567 foods in CalorieLookup. However, users are adding new foods all the time.

You can see a list of all recipes and foods in CalorieLookup. This is a long list, so it takes a long time to load. You probably really want to use the food search page

Why Do I have to Supply an Email and Personal Information to join CalorieLookup?

CalorieLookup uses your height, year of birth, gender, and current weight in order to estimate your basal metabolic rate (BMR). We also use your weight to estimate how many calories you will burn doing exercise. We ask users for an email address so that we have some way to contact them, especially if they forget their passwords. Note that we will never (ever ever) sell your email address (or any of your personally identifiable information) to anyone. In fact, we won't even ask for personally identifiable information such as your real name, where you live, etc...

We may in the future send “special offers” emails to users who have selected to receive them in their account settings.