Hi everyone! I am new to calorie counting, hope to find lots of advice and tips over here with you!

I have a problem already, which I know will only get worse the further along I go. I live in Egypt, and it is not required to have nutrition info on food items. This makes it hard to figure out what the calorie amount is for most foods. And, the brands of items here are obviously totally different from what is commonly found in the US (where I am from), so I can't just look them up online.

One of my main concerns is in bread. Bread is a staple food here, and I seriously don't think I can just give it up. But I have no clue what to figure calorie wise. I have started eating a diet bread that is made at my husbands bakery, but I have no clue what to compare it to even. I will see if he can get me the ingr. list for the bread, but in the huge amounts it is made in, I don't think I will even be able to figure out an amount that would be relatively close.

I guess this is actually more of a rant, lol, because it is just hard and frustrating trying to do this when I have no clue what is in different foods, and not being able to just look at the can/box/bag, and have the info right there for me. I won't give up, but just wondering what any of you do when faced with the same situation.

Thanks for any advice/feedback

Angie

If it were me, I would simply estimate based on what I know about calories.

F.

I would do a google search for calories for gram or ounce. For example... if it was whole wheat bread I would look up "whole wheat bread calories per gram". I would look at a couple different sites and then I would pick the average number and use it.

Yeah deff use google as a guide and if your not sure its better to over estimate just incase, so for this diet bread i would estimate it as a average slice from something you would normally eat in us

A lot of the things I eat don't have the nutritional value printed on them. Just google "calories in x" and you should find what you need. After a while you won't need to google every freaking thing (especially if you eat the same thing frequently) and you'll know the calorie counts off the top of your head.

If it's something like a restaurant that doesn't publish nutritional info, I tend to estimate and to be on the safe side I will just eat half the meal.

I too live somewhere where nutritional information is rare on non-imported pre-packaged foods. I mostly use google and approximate staples like white bread and wheat bread and then count my calories by weight. Like I'd get the calories per gram of something like "Arab White Pita Bread" or if it was a white bread I was unsure of, I'd just get the calories for white bread and estimate my calories by weight of how much I ate.

I was also really lucky to have an excellent offline calorie counting app (Tap n Track) on my iPod which had eclectic ingredients like plantain flour, yam flour, etc which are staples where I live.