Frequently Asked Questions

• Free: No pay per use, or monthly memberships. This site is ran by donations. As long as we get the funds to keep the site afloat, it will be free.
• Personal Food Libraries: Everyone with a new account starts with the most basic foods in their personal food library. You then can manually add additional foods or add foods from our own 9,000 USDA based food database. Why is this relevant? Simply put, not everyone eats the same kind of food, hence will have different library's. We have found that most people’s diets will only consist of about 20 different food items, and just having those food items specific to your life style in your food library will make using a calorie counter so much easier and faster.
• Personal Exercise List: Just like your Personal Food Library, you can create custom tailored exercises that you can use to easily reference for daily use.
• Estimated Weight Loss: From your last weigh in day, calculations are made that will allow you to see a preview of your Estimated Weight Loss (EWL). This is just an estimate based off of your BMR, calories burned and calories eaten. While not perfect, it’s a good idea of where you stand if you cannot get to a scale. After your third week of dieting, a Daily Adjustment will be available to help with the accuracy of measuring your EWL.
• Daily Adjustment: This interesting feature is still in BETA testing. Even using the science of 3500c = 1 pound of fat, is not always correct. This can be due to differences in metabolisms, eating habits, missing information or other factors. After the third week of dieting this feature becomes available and will provide an error correction to help calculate your Estimated Weight Loss.
• Over 9000 Food Database: We have incorporated the USDA food database into this site. You are able to search through it, and add any food you find to your own personal library. You can expect this to expand dramatically over the next couple months.
• History Tracking: Everything you eat, every exercise, every pound lost is stored so you can measure your progress over time. Visit the history tracker page to view what you ate and did months ago.
• Motivational Pictures: You will be able to upload two pictures which will be used to display when your withing your daily calorie limit and when you go over.

Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) represents the minimum amount of energy needed to keep your body functioning. Basically it’s the amount of calories you would burn if stayed in bed all day.

Your BMR is used to help calculate your TDEE (total daily energy expenditure), which in turn is used to calculate your Daily Calorie Limit.

There are several different ways to calculate BMR, we use the Harris Benedict Equation:

One of the wonderful features of Matthews Calorie Counter is our ability to give you a “weekly” and “daily” Estimated Weight Loss (EWL).

Your Estimated Weight Loss calculations are based off of your Total Daily Energy Expenditure and Total Calorie Intake per day. Even with the most diligent use of this calorie counter, after some time, variations between your Estimated Weight Loss and your Actual Weight loss may occur. This could be for any number of reasons, ranging from metabolism to miscalculated activities or foods. To counter act this, we have created the Daily Adjustment.

How it works:

This calorie counter will look at your Estimated Weight Loss and compare it to your Actual Weight Loss when you weigh in. If a discrepancy is detected, a Daily Adjustment is created. This Daily Adjustment is then used to offset your daily and overall Estimated Weight Loss calculations.

Daily Adjustment is currently in Beta Testing

This is a new feature that we are testing. The more people that use it the more we can fine tune it.

Daily Adjustment does not interfere with Actual Weight Loss calculations

Daily Adjustment will only be available after the start of your third week of dieting

Because the first week of weight loss can be extreme (due to dramatic loss of water weight) the calculations for the Daily Adjustment do not start until the third week. This way the data is not skewed.

Daily Adjustment will be unavailable if either of the following conditions is met:

-If this is a new diet, you must wait for two weeks before Daily Adjustment will become available.

-If it has been more than 30 days since your last weigh in, Daily Adjustment will be unavailable until a new weight is entered.

Manual: Manual Exercise entry allows you to have more control over your TDEE.

This method takes your BMR and multiplies it by a base Activity Multiplier (currently set at 1.2). The result is your "Daily Activity". "Daily Activity" represents you’re burned calories as if you lived a sedentary life style.

Any additional exercise or burned calories must be added by you, either manually or from the exercise calculator.

This can be a little more time consuming, but may be a bit more accurate than using "auto".

Auto: Using Auto entry allows you to choose a base activity level that best reflects your current lifestyle activity. A final TDEE is calculated for you. This method is less time consuming, but is not as accurate as manually keeping track of your daily burned calories.