New to calorie counting. I have no idea how many calories to count really. I need advise and help. I go to the gym and do an hour a day and burn about 650 calories or more. I weigh 233 pounds and need to loose alot. i go online and every counter tells me different. Help i need a support person and help. with working out how many calories do i eat! help

When I was your size, I was averaging about 2000 calories a day and losing steadily. Some might disagree, but I think you should start with the calories on the higher side and decrease as you lose more. For example, I decreased from 2000 to 1600 over the past seven months as I lost forty pounds. If you start off at 1600, you might hit a plateau and have to drop your calories a lot to keep losing weight at a fast pace. For your height, maybe 1800 would be a good start? I know it seems like a lot, but it's really not, when you factor in how much exercise you are doing. Maybe try that for a while and see how it goes? How much are you eating currently?

OP, trial and error! Start out with the higher estimates and see how you go. You can always adjust downwards if you feel you aren't losing steadily or quickly enough.

Yeah, this is the work of calorie counting: you have to weigh/count all the ingredients that go into your recipes in order to get the total. I track with myfitnesspal.com because they have a section where you can enter your recipes and work out the per serving values. Easy peasy.

not sure how many calories i should be eating a day

Ditto ditto ditto. TOtally agree. I wish I'd experimented more at the beginning. I dropped straight to like 1500-1600. It would have been smarter I think to drop to 2000 as see if I lost sufficiently. Then dropped more as I went.

Also, I count calories and carbs. I don't track fat, but I'm eating really whole unprocessed foods, so it's not really a problem. I'm not diabetic, but I track carbs to help with blood sugar, which helps me with hunger levels. If I eat the right foods to keep my blood sugar stable, then I don't get hungry so quick! I shoot for 45-60g of carbs for my 3 main meals and 15g for each of my 2-3 snacks.

When I started counting I was at 253lbs, and alotted around 1850 calories, per MyFitnessPal app. That was around 500cals under my Base metabolic rate. That seems to also be the median of all of the calorie calculators for me.
I could also track exercise (which I lowball the estimated calories burned, just in case) and that allows me to eat a few more calories, should I need them.
A good place to start is probably averaging what you get from various calorie counters. My app has me lower my daily calorie allowance, by around 50 cals, around every 10lbs lost...

If I were you I would start at 1800 and buy a food scale. Just practice a higher amount for 1 week or so. After you get used to it, you can see if you want to go lower.

Since as long as I can remember my diets have been 'Right, I want to lose weight so I'm eating no more than 1300 calories' and its left me here, still fat! For me 1300 is not maintainable and it is not practical because I cave after a couple of weeks and want to eat everything in sight! So I calculated my BMR (google BMR calculator) and worked out how many my body needs to maintain with my exercise and literally subtracted 600 from it to lose a pound a week - and guess what, it works! This leaves me eating 1800-2000 a day, and SO happy that I have found something I could do forever, so take slytherinanachronism's advice and shoot for higher, and see what happens!

It depends on your body weight. I eat 1200-1500 depending on how hungry I am in a day. If I exercise, I eat a little more.

At calorie count's website, for your current weight, activity and height (and I used 30 years old since I don't know) it calculated your current caloric daily burn at 2710. To lose weight, eliminate 500 daily calories for a weekly deficit of 3500 to lose 1 lb. of fat. You should be consuming 2210.

There are sites that will calculate a daily target for you, but I find them to almost always return a target that is much lower than removing 500 calories from your current consumption.

That others mentioned 2000 calories, that seems about right, and the more weight you lose, the less calories needed to continue to lose, so the target needs to be revisited.

There is no need for 1200 calories a day--that isn't sustainable in the long run and may do more harm than good because the body might get used to that little bit and hold onto every ounce.

The aim is to diet smart and not hard.

I really like caloriecount.com, and I've visited other calorie logging sites. I just don't seem to be able to make the switch to any others even tho I've tried.

Good luck to you.

In mid-January I decided to make a life style change and to do what I could live on for the rest of my life and I have lost 85 pounds. Calories are so simple to me.

I went on line also and found a calorie counter that estimated based on current weight, height, goal weight. I use either MyFitnessPal.com or Livestrong.com to count the calories. However, I have found they don't always count the calories the same. So I do research online whenever I get confused about the calorie of something.

I also have my own rules:

When feasible:
Eat low fat.
Eat low carb.
Eat low sugar

I eat from 1200 to 1500 calories. I have found sticking to one amount day after day causes to many plateaus.

I also keep a food diary. Everything that goes in my mouth is written down. This keeps me honest. So I don't wonder why I am not losing.

I have recently joined a gym and have a personal trainer. She has recommended 1400 per day and 5 meals a day. She says that eating 5 times helps lose fat and builds muscle instead of losing muscle. However, the 5 meal thing doesn't always work with my life schedule.

As others have commented above, I say experiment and see what works for you.

Good Luck