I met my weight loss goal so I'm not really eating to lose weight any longer. I'm eating to maintain my weight now.  But when I was eating to lose weight I was eating around 1500 calories per day. Here is where I posted all my goals and limits:

http://blog.calorie-help.com/2009/02/06/diet-modification-plan-part-2/

When I make food at home and there isn't nutritional information on the packaging I'll do a google search for it. For example, if I was having chicken I might do a search for "chicken breast nutrition".  I have also gone to the brand names website to see if they have the information there. Sometimes I can't get the exact information so I have to estimate the best I can.

With things like the smoothie I make I used the nutritional information on the packaging and calculated what the entire smoothies nutritional information was. It was a pain in the butt the first time but once I had it figured out I could use those same numbers each time I made that smoothie.

I think that the biggest thing that helped me was keeping meticulous track of what I was eating. Once you realize exactly what you are having it's much easier to see where you need to make changes.