Video: How to Count Calories & Fat in Food

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When counting calories and fat in food, it's crucial to pay attention to the portion sizes on the labels. Track your calories and fat intake with guidance from a certified diabetic educator in this free video on nutrition.

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Video Transcript

Hi I'm Nancy Dell. I'm a Registered Dietitian and Certified Diabetic Educator. I own Nancy Dell and Associates Nutrition Counseling in Feeding Hills, Massachusetts. Today we're going to be talking about counting calories and fat. First, if you're counting calories, you want to determine how many you need each day. An easy way to do that if you're trying to lose weight is take your ideal body weight and add a 0. So if you feel that 140 pounds would be ideal for you, you add a 0 and eat 1,400 calories a day to get to that 140 pounds. That's a very simple way to do it but ideally a dietitian can help you calculate exactly what you need. When you're counting calories you're going to look at the nutrition label and the first thing you want to look at is the serving size that the label is referring to. In this case it's a half a cup of the food and then simply look at how many calories in that half a cup in this case there is 150 calories. So it's very straightforward. It is important when you're counting calories though to measure the food. If you're off by just a quarter of a cup then you're going to get extra calories that may interfere with your weight loss. Just as examples of portion sizes here this is about three ounces of meat. This would be about a half a cup of potato or it could be ice cream, a tablespoon of peanut butter or a third of a cup of rice. So portion sizes might be considerably smaller looking than what you would imagine. You can use a food scale preferably a digital one if you want to weight your food and be more precise in counting your calories. Now when it comes to counting fat again a dietitian can help you determine how much you need each day but if you're trying to lower your cholesterol then generally we're looking at somewhere maybe between 15 to 25 grams of saturated fat a day and generally for trans fat which is also hydrogenated oil you want to have one or less, preferably having no hydrogenated oil at all so when you look at your nutrition label again you're going to look at your serving size that they are referring to and here I have highlighted in pink the information on the saturated fat and the trans fat. So think of these numbers like money. If you can have 20 grams of saturated fat a day you are spending .5 grams in a single serving of this food so think of it like spending half a dollar in a single serving of this food. So it can be very simple when we equate it to money. Now the trans fat is a little trickier. It can say 0 but you can still get some trans fat or hydrogenated oil in the food. By law a food that has less than half a gram of trans fat per serving can call it 0 on the label. This runs into a problem with some foods like microwave popcorn or coffee creamer, those powdered coffee creamers because we use much more than one serving. A serving of microwave popcorn may be just a single cup and we eat the whole bag or we might just have a serving one tablespoon of creamer and we use three tablespoons so your trans fat can add up quickly. What you want to do to be sure you get no trans fat or very little is look at the ingredient label. Here's a sample of a food that shows you 0 trans fat, however, it does have hydrogenated oil in the ingredients so ideally you'd want to avoid that food if possible or only eat a single serving of that food to keep your trans fat in check. Now in order to lose weight you do want to cut your calories by about 500 calories a day and over seven days that would add up to about 3,500 calories which is one pound of fat, a significant amount of fat, looks like about four sticks of butter. So you can certainly cut 500 calories relatively easily without getting too hungry. So when you're counting calories and fat you're going to refer to the nutrition label but be sure to check that serving size and if you're watching trans fat make sure you check the ingredients so you don't get hydrogenated oil.

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How to Count Calories & Fat in Food

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