What number of calories is considered to be too many calories?!

Every person needs to eat a different number of calories for their bodies. Beyond that, it's a good idea to eat more calories earlier in the day, and to eat gradually fewer calories as the day goes by. This is because if you wait and eat tons of calories in your evening meal, your body won't burn much off before bedtime. So just asking whether 400 calories is too much or too little is a tricky question, since it depends on the person and on the meal.

Go to http://www.dailyplate.com and enter your personal stats into it: age, gender, height, weight, activity level, and weight goals. It will tell you how many calories you personally should be eating. (This website is also a great, free way to keep track of how many calories you're eating each day. It's the truest no-diet diet fix.)

Tip about reading labels: The calorie count doesn't matter as much as other things. If you're eating the right number of calories each day for your body (see above website), then you might sometimes eat high-calorie (or "dense") foods and sometimes eat low-calorie foods. Here are the things you should pay attention to on a food label: Sugar, salt, and fat.

--Sugar content. My personal rule is to have nothing with more than 12g of sugar in a serving. I do "cheat" once a week and have something ridiculously sugary, like a latte. The number one reason to cut out sugars is because they deaden your taste-buds. If you're trying to get healthy, you're going to be increasing your vegetable and fruit consumption and other kinds of wholesome foods. If you're used to eating tons of sugar, though, you're going to think veggies are kind of bland and gross and you'll be tempted to saute them in heaps of butter and salt. If you let your tastebuds recover from their sugar overdoses, though, you'll find that everything else in the world has beautiful tastes. (Trust no fat chef-- his palate is damaged from salts, fats, and sugars, and he can't truly tell what things taste like.)

--Sodium content. Just comparison shop. The lower the better, basically. If anything says that it's 300mg or more of sodium in a serving, I put it back.

--Fats. Avoid trans fat and saturated fat. It's okay to have teeny tiny amounts of saturated fat sometimes, but no trans fats at all. In general, you want to avoid most things that have more than 10g of fat, and most things you buy should have under 10g. Good sources of fat include plain nuts, avocados, olive oil, and lean cuts of grassfed meats.

Basically, you want to buy most of your stuff from around the outside of the grocery store and stay away from the forests of highly-processed shelves.

The recommendation is between 2000 and 2500 calories a day, so plan accordingly