Free Calorie Tracker Online

The simplest way to track calories online for free

Most calorie counting apps make you create an account, sit through ads, or hit a paywall the moment you want a basic feature like barcode scanning. This tracker doesn’t. There’s no sign-up, no subscription, and no ads — just open the page and start logging. Your food diary is stored right in your browser, so it’s private and works even when you’re offline.

How to use the free calorie tracker & macros counter

1. Set a daily calorie goal. Enter a target and we’ll split balanced macros for you. Not sure what to aim for? Use the freecalorie calculator or macro calculator to get a personalized target in seconds.
2. Add your meals. Under Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner, or Snacks, tap “Add food”, search for what you ate, choose a serving size, and add it. You can search our food calorie lookup database, the USDA database, and packaged products with our free barcode scanner — or enter a food manually.
3. Watch your totals update. Calories consumed, calories remaining, and macro rings (protein, carbs, and fat) update in real time with every item you log.

Why tracking calories online works

Tracking calories and macros builds awareness around portion sizes and energy density. Whether your goal is weight loss in a calorie deficit, muscle building in a surplus, or maintaining your weight, having an instant, free food diary removes friction so you can build sustainable dietary habits.

What you are searching when you log a food

Every search runs first against our own curated database of 321 whole foods across 11 browsable categories, taken from the USDA FoodData Central Foundation Foods dataset and released into the public domain (CC0). These are laboratory-measured values for single ingredients — chicken breast, rolled oats, cheddar, olive oil — which is exactly what you want for the base of a meal.

Packaged products are a different problem, so they use a different source. The barcode scanner and live lookup query the full USDA database and Open Food Facts, where values come from the manufacturer's own label. Those are accurate for the product as sold but vary between regions and reformulations, so if a scanned result looks wrong, cross-check it against the equivalent whole food in our food database.

The five things that cause most logging error

Studies that compare self-reported intake against measured energy expenditure find people under-report by roughly 20–30%. It is almost never spread evenly across the day — it concentrates in five specific places:

1. Cooking fat. A tablespoon of oil is about 120 kcal and it disappears into the pan. A free-poured glug is commonly two or three tablespoons. Weighing oil and butter is the single highest-yield habit in calorie tracking.
2. Drinks. Juice, milky coffee, smoothies, beer and wine are eaten quickly and forgotten completely. Alcohol carries 7 kcal/g and belongs to none of the three macros, so log it as its own entry rather than skipping it.
3. Portion size guessed by eye. Estimation error is proportional to energy density, so it barely matters for salad and matters enormously for nuts, cheese, granola and peanut butter — the foods where 30 g looks like a rounding error and costs 200 kcal.
4. Bites, licks and tastes. The spoonful while cooking, the crusts off a child's plate, three chips from someone else's bowl. Individually trivial, collectively a few hundred calories a day.
5. Restaurant and takeaway meals. Published figures assume the kitchen's standard build; a real plate has more oil, more butter and a larger portion. When a meal is out of your control, log the closest match and round up.

Estimating portions when you have no scale

A kitchen scale is worth more than any app feature, but you will not always have one. These hand and household references are approximate and deliberately conservative — use them to log a meal you would otherwise skip, not as a replacement for weighing the calorie-dense foods above.

What the number at the bottom of your diary is worth

The "calories remaining" figure only means something once you know what a gap between intake and expenditure buys you. Using the standard approximation of 7,700 kcal per kilogram of body fat (3,500 kcal per pound):

Two things follow from that table. First, the weekly average is what moves the scale, not any single day — one heavy Saturday inside an otherwise consistent week costs you a fraction of a pound, not your progress. Second, a 200 kcal logging error is roughly 40% of a 500 kcal deficit, which is why accuracy in the diary matters more than shaving another 100 kcal off your target. Work out your own target in the calorie deficit calculator.

Where your diary is actually stored

There is no account, so there is nowhere for your food log to be sent. Everything you enter is written to browser storage on the device you are using — IndexedDB where it is available, because a diary with months of history outgrows the ~5 MB localStorage cap, with localStorage as the fallback and an in-memory store when the browser blocks both (private windows, hardened privacy settings). It all lives under a single namespaced key, which has three practical consequences:

• It is per-device and per-browser. Logging on your phone will not show up on your laptop, and Chrome will not see what you logged in Safari.
• Clearing site data deletes it. "Clear cookies and site data", some cleaner extensions, and private-window sessions all remove the diary. Take a backup before you clean up a browser.
• You own the file. The progress dashboard exports your complete data envelope as a JSON download — use it to move devices, keep an archive, or reset from scratch.

Your first two weeks, in order

1. Days 1–3: log what you already eat. Change nothing. You cannot adjust a number you have not measured, and most people find the problem is one specific meal rather than the whole day.
2. Day 3: set a target. Get your maintenance calories from the TDEE calculator, then a goal-based target from the calorie calculator, and split it into grams with the macro calculator.
3. Days 4–14: build repeatable meals. Save the breakfasts and lunches that fit; a diary gets fast when most days reuse five or six entries you have already logged once.
4. Day 14: compare averages, not weigh-ins. Average days 1–3 against days 12–14. If weight held steady, your real maintenance is whatever you actually ate — use that number, not the estimate.

Build the day rather than just recording it

A diary is most useful before the meal, not after it. Two food properties decide whether a calorie target feels easy or punishing: protein per calorie, which drives satiety and protects lean mass, and energy density in kcal per gram, which decides how much food your budget actually buys. At 0.3 kcal/g you can eat a kilo of food for 300 calories; at 5 kcal/g the same calories are 60 g.

So pick from high-protein foods first, add volume from low-calorie foods and high-fibre foods, and check anything you eat often against its full numbers in the food calorie database — every page there scales calories, macros, %DV, net carbs and energy density to your real portion. For packaged items, the barcode scanner is faster than typing. This page provides general information and is not medical advice.