For people like me...

There's not much to it, you only need to know a few things. Although if someone more knowledgeable wants to correct me, feel free!

1) Limit yourself to around 1500 calories a day, 2000 if you don't mind stretching it a little bit.

2) All the nutritional information is on the side of pretty much every food packet possible. It's mostly in Kj (in Metric countries, anyway), but you just divide the number by 4 to get the number of calories. So something with 400kj is roughly 100 calories, etc.

3) Keep track of it all, like I did above. Cereal has 1 cup per serving, and 1 cup is X amount of calories. Milk has X amount of calories per serve. The combined amount is your calorie count for that meal. Easy!

4) exercise! Half an hour's worth of jogging will - as far as I know, and I'm happy to "run" with it - burns about 300-400 calories.