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Spend a couple of weeks/months preparing your own food and weighing everything. Use an app like MyFitnessPal to record and count your calories. It doesn't take very long to develop an intuition that's "good enough" about how many calories a deli sandwich contains.

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2% extra calories per day ~= gaining 6 pounds a year. I doubt you can get within 2% making this far less useful.

Basically, you need a feedback mechanism like your actual weight. Counting calories is not about actual calories it's a way to cut back if your not getting the results you want.

Yes, sorry I should have mentioned that. You need to track your weight along with counting calories and make adjustments to your caloric intake based on the weight you are gaining/losing. You don't need to be within 2% accuracy (frankly that's not feasible anyways) just consistent.

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