Here are a number of points to help understand how to count calories:

1. Calorie counting boils down to understanding the calories you burn and consume everyday. If you can maintain a basic deficit where you are consuming less calories that you burn, you should be able to achieve steady weight loss.

2. A deficit of 3500 calories should result in roughly 1 pound of weight loss. It is fairly widely recommended that people should intend to achieve about 1 to 2 pounds of weight loss a week until a healthy weight is reached. This would mean a deficit of 3500 to 7000 calories a week or 500 to 1000 calories a day.

3. To create a calorie deficit you can aim to raise your exercise, eat less or just cut back the higher calorie foods from your diet.

4. To get an understanding of the number of calories in food, have a look at a web calorie counter. Such calorie counters permit you to search a large database of foods and drinks and will enable you to see the calories in various serving sizes as well as other nutritional information.

5. The calories in different types of foods can be quite significant. For instance, in a medium sized apple, there are roughly 95 calories and in a medium sized banana, there is about 105 calories. Compare this to a medium serving of McDonald's french fries containing about 370 calories or a cheeseburger containing about 313 calories (data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, USDA, National Nutrient Database for Standard Reference).

As you can see, shedding weight does not need to mean you must go hungry, but rather, picking the most sensible foods to satisfy yourself can really make lots of difference.

6. To get a general guess of the number of calories you burn a day, you can use a web calorie calculator. Such calculators take some basic inputs about yourself and will return an estimate of the amount of calories you burn a day. For instance, a 78kg female who is 5 foot nine inches tall, 29 years old and who exercises lightly (1-3 days per week) should burn approximately 2160 calories a day.

7. It is a good practice while trying to lose pounds to maintain a journal of the food and drinks you are consuming. This will help you total the amount of calories you are consuming a day and compare this to how many you are typically burning a day.

8. You should always consult your doctor before commencing a weight loss program.