Consuming more calories than you are burning results in weight gain. In order to successfully shed extra pounds, consume fewer than you burn daily; moderate consumption is key as excessive or extreme diets may damage health.

Gabriel Seow was used to tracking his calories, but not so aware of what was costing him for food. Planner Bee challenged Gabriel Seow to stretch his budget further.

Tracking Your Calories

Tracking calories helps you remain in charge of your diet and weight loss efforts. While calorie counting may not provide an exact science solution, it can still assist with making informed choices regarding what and how much to consume (38).

Calorie needs can vary widely depending on a number of factors such as height, body weight, muscle to fat ratio, age, genes, health status and physical exercise regimen. A fairly accurate estimation can be made based on two components – Basal Metabolic Rate and Physical Exercise.

Lifesum is an intelligent calorie counting app with nutrition advice and feedback to motivate and inspire you on your health journey. Food Logger allows users to easily log food manually or with barcode scanning technology and provides access to a database of commonly eaten hawker and restaurant foods with energy and nutritional details. Dieting provides you with a flexible plan tailored specifically to your lifestyle and goals, rather than tracking a fixed number of calories. However, an undergraduate sample found that counting calories may increase eating disorder behaviors as well as clinical impairment (39). Due to unrealistic expectations or obsessive counting that can arise when individuals use apps for tracking meals (41)(40), using such an app may help reach your goals more efficiently. Nonetheless, tracking daily calories could prove useful as a tool towards reaching them.

Tracking Your Exercise

Tracking calories and exercise will allow you to understand your daily energy balance and calorie consumption vs output, as well as identify which activities contribute the most towards exercise and calorie expenditure, encouraging and inspiring you to keep going towards reaching your goals.

The Healthy 365 App by the Health Promotion Board of Singapore features an interactive dashboard designed to track an individual’s calorie balance, steps count, active time and distance covered on a daily basis. In addition, this app contains a diet journal and food database to assist users in making healthier food choices as well as discovering programs, offerings and healthy dining venues in their area.

Monitoring Your Weight

An effective calorie tracker in Singapore should be easy to use and provide valuable feedback. A food database listing the calories and nutritional info for commonly eaten hawker and restaurant food, packaged products as well as their barcode should also be included; users can then search them via name or barcode before manually or barcode scanning them to log them manually or automatically.

A good calorie tracker should offer history charts to compare calories consumed with those burned and weight charts to show differences. Furthermore, challenges and tiered rewards should motivate users towards maintaining a healthier lifestyle through eating healthily and participating in physical activities regularly. Finally, compatibility with other health and fitness wearables makes monitoring progress across multiple devices much simpler.