Weight Loss Tips & Tricks: NIH's Calorie Calculator Now Available for Public Use

For those who are trying to lose weight, there's a new calorie calculator by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) that you can use.

NIH's new calculator is named Body Weight Planner and can be accessed by anybody online.

The calculator is impressively thorough as it aims to help its users in reaching their weight goal plans. There are three basic and simple questionnaires that the user must answer before being taken to the results page.

To use the calculator, information such as weight, sex, age, height and an estimation of physical activity level must be inputted by the user.

On to the next step, the Body Weight Planner asks for the goal weight and the number of days or months in which the user hopes to reach the weight loss goal.  The third form asks for the level of physical activity the user can commit for the weight loss regimen.

The last form leads to the results where the NIH calculator will give an exact measurement of how much calories per day should be consumed to maintain one's current weight, an exact number of calories one should eat daily to reach the goal weight and a recommendation of how many calories to intake daily once the weight goal has been reached.

In order to help you reach your weight loss goals, the calculator helpfully provides an estimate of how much physical activity you must commit in order to shed the excess pounds.

For the more serious weight-loss entrant, there is also an expert mode with more advanced controls with the inclusion of a simulation chart, body fat calculator and BMI tracker, just to name a few.

Time reports that the NIH first used the calculator for their own research since 2011.

"We originally intended the Body Weight Planner as a research tool, but so many people wanted to use it for their own weight management that we knew we needed to adapt it with more information about how to achieve a healthy lifestyle," said Dr. Kevin Hall, cocreator of the calculator and senior investigator at the NIH.

The outlet added that there is a meal-planning tool by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), called the SuperTracker, that can be used in conjunction with the Body Weight Planner.

The online nutritional plan was developed specifically to be personalized for each user. A meal plan can be based on the calorie stats from NIH's weight loss calculator. There are also a lot of features that are found in the SuperTracker such as Food-A-Pedia, Food Tracker, Physical Activity Tracker, Weight Manager, Top 5 Goals and Recipe listings.