It’s always a good idea to keep an idea on how many calories you’re eating each day, because it will tell you whether you’re getting the right amount to properly power your body through energy.
The calories that you get from fat are also very important, particularly if you’re keeping an eye on your weight, either trying to lose some or gain some.
But how do you know how many you’re eating? How do you calculate calories from fat?
Thankfully, it’s quite easy. To put it simply, you’ll need the nutrition information for each piece of food that you’re eating, and a calculator.
You can read the exact specifics in our handy guide below. We’ve got all the answers you need, telling you just exactly how to calculate the calories you’re getting from fat.
On top of that, we’ll break down how you can also calculate how many fat calories you should be eating each day, and how you can work to reach that without going beyond.
How To Calculate Calories From Fat
Calculating the amount of calories that you’re getting from fat in each piece of food you eat is thankfully quite easy, if a little time consuming should you do it for each meal.
It only takes a few steps and a little bit of math, but is more than worth it for how helpful it will be in order to allow you to keep on top of the amount of calories and fat that you’re consuming each day.
Step One: Look At The Food Packet’s Nutritional Label
You will have noticed that on the packaging for each piece of food you eat, there will always be a small table that breaks down the nutrition that you’re getting from the food.
This covers the overall energy/calorie content, but also looks at fat, carbohydrates (including a separate figure for sugars), protein, fiber, and salt.
This information is incredibly useful for balancing your diet and leading a healthy lifestyle.
You will find the table on the back of the package usually, clearly laid out in a rectangle and saying “Nutrition” at the top – or something similar.
Look at the table and find the row that covers “Fat”. Next to it, it should have a figure in grams that will tell you how many grams of fat are in the food per serving.
For example, it might say 2.2g. Write the number down.
What if there is no nutrition panel? In these rare cases, look up the manufacturer online and see if they have the information on their website.
Instead, you might have made the food yourself from a recipe. In those cases, look at the recipe for information.
Alternatively, you might have been in a restaurant having the food. Here, check out the nutrition information on the menu, or ask.
In the cases where you do have a nutritional panel on your packaging, you might actually be lucky enough that it already states how many calories you’ll get from the fat.
This is your answer already, and you won’t need to follow the other steps.
Step Two: Multiplication
With your written-down number of grams, you’ll want to simply multiply it by 9. This is due to the fact that a single gram of fat contains 9 calories.
If we use our example from earlier, where we had 2.2 grams of fat, just do 2.2×9. This comes to 19.8.
This means that in this case, the serving you ate of the food will have given you 19.8 calories from the fat alone.
Step Three: Making A Percentage
With your answer for the number of calories that come from fat, you can work out what percentage those specific calories are of the overall calorie content of the serving.
All you have to do for this is divide the number of fat calories in a serving by the total number of calories in a serving.
Imagine that the overall calorie content for a serving of your food is 245 calories. If we use our example of fat calories from earlier, 19.8, we just do 19.8÷245.
This equals 0.0808. To make this a percentage, we move the decimal point two to the right and times it by 100. So: 0.0808×100=8.08
Therefore, this food has a fat percentage of around 8%.
Working Out How Many Calories From Fat You Need
It’s important to get the amount of calories that are right for you, especially when it comes to those from fat.
Many factors come into this and it’s different for everybody, based on age, sex, and how active you are.
There are online calculators to give you a good idea based on these statistics, or you can ask a doctor.
You can work out how much fat your diet needs. The ideal percentage is between 20-35%. If you’re on a low-fat diet, this will be the lower end, 20-25%.
To work out how many fat calories you can eat each day, multiply your daily calorie limit by the percentage of fat calories you can eat daily.
Turn your percentage into a decimal for the equation, placing a decimal in front.
For example, your daily limit is 2100 calories and you want 20% of your calories to come from fat. Make the percentage a decimal (0.20).
This means the sum is: 2100X0.20=420. Your daily calories from fat would be 420.
Finally, divide this by 9, since there are 9 calories in every gram of fat. This will tell you how many grams of fat you can consume every day to keep your fat calorie limit.
For example, 420÷9. This equals 46.67 grams.
Final Thoughts
Tracking how many fat calories you eat is helpful and important.
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