You take things apart and weigh them, or make good estimates based on total weight. You don't need to be very accurate, anything within ~25% error is fine. You just need to be very consistent.
The USDA has a great database that provides you all the raw materials (and many of the packaged composite items) to use, and once you've eaten a thing and recorded the values, you can simply reuse them infinitely. One ham sandwich, if you're consistent about it, is a given calorie intake.
The key is what that lets you do: It lets you analyze your intake versus body composition and weight, determine whether you're eating too much, too little, or a bad ratio, and then make slow changes over time to fix that problem.
If you're like me right now, you're overweight. Okay, look at your calorie count, reduce it by say 5% or 10%, wait a month, see how your body composition changes, and reanalyze.
With this method you don't need to be dead-on-balls-accurate with your calorie counting, only consistent and reasonable.
As bizarre as it may sound, I have found that buying only pre-packaged food for a few weeks really helps people get a ballpark feel for what 1900 calories (or whatever) looks/feels like. Because the calories on packaged food exist by law (even if they aren't always completely accurate), it's a really easy way learn about it. After that people can develop some intuition (like, "I only ate a few mouthfuls of cheese. How many calories could that be?" or "It's just trail mix. It's healthy. Peanuts and raisins. Like 0 calories!" or "I just have a single bran muffin and a coffee for breakfast. It's not even a meal" or... well you get the idea).
You take things apart and weigh them, or make good estimates based on total weight. You don't need to be very accurate, anything within ~25% error is fine. You just need to be very consistent.
The USDA has a great database that provides you all the raw materials (and many of the packaged composite items) to use, and once you've eaten a thing and recorded the values, you can simply reuse them infinitely. One ham sandwich, if you're consistent about it, is a given calorie intake.
The key is what that lets you do: It lets you analyze your intake versus body composition and weight, determine whether you're eating too much, too little, or a bad ratio, and then make slow changes over time to fix that problem.
If you're like me right now, you're overweight. Okay, look at your calorie count, reduce it by say 5% or 10%, wait a month, see how your body composition changes, and reanalyze.
With this method you don't need to be dead-on-balls-accurate with your calorie counting, only consistent and reasonable.