Is It Good for Weight Loss?

Pick a food and a portion. You get what it really costs in calories, how filling that portion is likely to be, what it gives back per calorie — and, where there is one, a lighter thing of the same kind. No food is called good or bad here, because no food is.

80 foods from the USDA’s own database — type a few letters.

    How much?
    g
    kcal

    Adds what this portion is as a share of your day. The calorie calculator on this site works that number out.

    Tahini, 1 tbsp

    89 calories

    Lighter, and the same kind of thing

      What energy density means
      BandCalories per gramWhat that means

      No food burns fat, and nothing here is a verdict on a food. These are the USDA’s numbers for a named row of its database, scaled to the portion you chose — what a food costs you, not whether you should eat it. Fresh food has no label, so real portions vary; weigh yours if it matters.

      USDA data checked 2026-09-23.

      Quick answer: no food is good or bad for weight loss. What decides it is how many calories a filling portion costs you — which is mostly about how much water and fibre the food carries, and how much fat. A food under about 1.5 calories per gram lets you eat a proper plateful cheaply; one over 4 puts a day’s worth of calories in a handful. This page gives you that number, and the protein and fibre you get back, for any of 80 common foods.

      How to use it

      Type a few letters of the food and pick it, then choose one of the portions the USDA publishes for it — or type your own amount in grams or ounces. If you put your own daily calorie target in the last box, it also tells you what the portion is as a share of your day.

      Why “is X good for weight loss?” is the wrong question

      It is the question everybody asks, including in dozens of articles on this site, and it does not have an answer — because a food is not a diet. Tahini is not fattening; four tablespoons of it, eaten absent-mindedly out of the jar, is 350 calories. Watermelon is not slimming; it is mostly water, which is why a huge bowl of it is 80 calories.

      The useful question is what does a portion of this cost me, and how full does it leave me? That has an answer, and it comes down to three numbers this page prints:

      • Energy density — calories per gram. People tend to eat a fairly consistent weight of food each day rather than a consistent number of calories, so the lower this number is, the more food you get for the same calories.
      • Protein per 100 calories — protein is the most satiating of the three macronutrients, and this is the way to compare foods of wildly different sizes.
      • Fibre — it adds weight and bulk without much energy, and it slows the whole meal down.

      Where the numbers come from

      Every food here is one row of the USDA’s FoodData Central SR Legacy release, quoted per 100 grams and scaled to your portion. Each answer names the exact row it used and links to the USDA’s own record, so you can check it rather than take our word for it. Nothing is averaged across brands, and there is no invented “score”, “index” or “rating” anywhere on this page — those are the things that make a food tool look authoritative while meaning nothing.

      The four energy-density bands are the classification published by Barbara Rolls, whose research group has done most of the work on this. The CDC’s own brief on low-energy-dense foods explains the mechanism well and does not print cut-offs, so we cite it for the idea and Rolls for the numbers.

      What the swaps are, and what they are not

      Where there is a lighter food of the same kind, the page names up to three, with how much more of them the same calories buy. It will not tell you to eat celery instead of steak: a swap is only offered inside the same food group, because the point is to keep the meal you were going to have. And where nothing in that group is meaningfully lighter — nut butters, for instance, are all about the same — it says so instead of inventing something.

      The honest limits

      Fresh food has no label and real portions vary: a “medium” banana covers a wide range, and cooking changes weight considerably. The database rows are standard references, not your particular loaf or your particular cut of meat. And a calorie figure says nothing about whether a food is worth eating for other reasons — the fibre in beans, the omega-3 in salmon, the pleasure of the thing you actually want.

      FAQ

      Is tahini good for weight loss?
      Tahini is about 6 calories per gram, which is high-energy-dense — a tablespoon is roughly 89 calories, and it is easy to use three without noticing. That does not make it bad: it carries protein, and in a dressing it makes a large plate of vegetables worth eating. Measure it rather than pouring it, and it fits any deficit.
      Which foods are lowest in calories for their size?
      Anything mostly water: cucumber, lettuce, tomatoes, courgette, mushrooms, watermelon, broth-based soups. They sit under 0.6 calories per gram, so a genuinely large portion costs almost nothing. That is the practical version of “eat more vegetables” — not a moral rule, just arithmetic about what fills a plate.
      Do any foods burn fat?
      No. Chilli, green tea and caffeine nudge energy expenditure by an amount too small to matter against what a day of eating does, and “negative calorie foods” are not a real category — chewing celery does not cost more than the celery contains. What works is a deficit you can keep, which is much easier when the food is filling.
      Should I count calories by weight or by portion?
      By weight, if you want the number to be right. Portion sizes drift, and the foods where that matters most are exactly the dense ones — oils, nut butters, cheese, cereal. Weighing those three or four things for a fortnight teaches you more about your own eating than a month of estimating everything.
      Why does the same food have different calories in different apps?
      Because they are quoting different rows: raw versus cooked, with skin or without, one brand’s recipe or another’s. Cooking alone changes the number, mostly by driving off water. This page tells you which row it used and links to it, which is the only honest way to publish a food number.
      Is a high-protein food always better?
      Protein is the most filling macronutrient per calorie, so a high-protein choice usually makes a deficit easier to hold — which is why the page prints protein per 100 calories. It is not a licence, though: a protein bar at 5 calories per gram is still a dense snack, and the same protein from yoghurt or fish comes with far more food attached to it.