These apps look gimmicky but they are growing like crazy. CalAI, for example, is making 35M+/yr. I’m hoping that some people really find value in these apps and that they are not just a pure marketing driven play.
That’s exactly what I was thinking when I read the article. ”Why are you thinking this is meant to work?”. But of course, normal trusting people will believe it if it’s on the ”trusted app stores”.
These apps with graphs are just selling you a sense of control, of compulsive metric driven decision making. Its partly the consumers’ own fault – many people won’t care even if they knew. But it’s also predatory by the companies. It’s consumer tech in a nutshell: put a pretty but shitty app on the App Store, spend 80% on marketing, show ads in the free tier, sell overpriced premium offerings to those who are careless with money, rinse and repeat. I follow some subreddits and groups for ”entrepreneurs” and it’s just like this.
I don’t mind if the reality of their business is similar to gyms in the sense that they make money off of peoples desires but have low utilization.
I used calorie counter apps before and they helped me lose weight (by mostly educating me what to eat/avoid). With these apps, I feel like the core premise - counting calories - isn’t even working and they’re selling people hopes and dreams. That’s danger territory.
There is good money in the App Store once you crack social marketing. The founder shows several videos of reloading the App Store Connect page showing revenue numbers. It's not unbelievable.
I've heard from someone who knows that they're scamming people like crazy. Supposedly they also setup a bunch of LLCs to hire influencers then never paid them.
I suspect this might be because diet marketing before AI was one of the most fraught with misinformation subjects you could run across. This is because the "sale" of the idea has an effect on every salesman, so all of the salesmen are trying to sell every thing at once,since that's also selling their thing, and ground truth gets stampeded. Now when you combine diet marketing and AI, you get a multiplier. Both in the sellers and the buyers, since the desire to believe is stacked.
This makes me sad. Yes a fool and their money are soon parted but this drives user expectations for apps even lower, pushing competent apps out of the market because of the price difference.
Gimmicky my ass. I speak a sentence every night on a thread to ChatGPT about what I had for breakfast, lunch and dinner along with quantities and it spits out my macros and nutritional breakdowns effectively. It’s the easiest and most no nonsense way I have found to record this information. Since it’s all on the same thread it always outputs the data in the same format and I can ask it for information over custom time ranges on the fly. I’ve also uploaded the nutritional labels for all my protein shakes and supplements to the same thread so I can just say “I had my nighttime shake” and it knows what I am talking about immediately.
>I speak a sentence every night on a thread to ChatGPT about what I had for breakfast, lunch and dinner along with quantities and it spits out my macros and nutritional breakdowns effectively.
I do this too and it's been spot on. I also have a very good idea of what I'm eating though: "2 oz of steel cut oats, 1 banana, probably about 4oz by weight, without the peal, about 12 ounces of coffee with 1 tsp of sugar and about 4oz of light no-sugar almond milk"
Not OP, but I have verified, and it is accurate. At least accurate enough from images or descriptions when assuming average proportions. Where it's really accurate is when you have measurements, even rough. I took to having a 1/2 cup scoop around the house so I could get volume measurements.
Initially I verified against labels by eating the serving size precisely. Then, I switched to weighing and doing the math on random days or meals.
For some items I would tell it the calories and macros and it would remember (a pb spoon is a common treat around my house).
It's good.
But like all food journalling the benefits are not so much having macro balances or tallies, its in making you aware and making you think about what you're eating. That alone takes you out of autopilot and lets you eat better.
It's just bad at math. So I would ask it to output a json struct for each day, that I could inspect by sight, then I'd save that and had a python script to actually tally.
Tasks like summing a bunch of numbers from different parts of the input over a specific time period are still pretty error prone for LLMs. I would exercise caution if these results are important to you. A database or spreadsheet is going to be far more reliable – maybe you could have ChatGPT output a structured format and you could do the summation in a google sheet?
Read the article. What you are doing has nothing to do with the apps the article is talking about.
You are providing accurate info to an LLM and it is assisting you with information processing.
These apps are trying to just take a picture of arbitrary food and just trusting a neural network to be magical and tell you the macros in the food from a photo.
I like how in the article the author includes the instructions for Cal AI:
- Include a reference object (like a coin or your hand) for scale
And then the screenshots show just a pictures of bowls of food with no reference objects at all.
Honestly curious if that would have improved the author's experience.
Weird article, it mentions three apps at the beginning, doesn't even test two of them in favor of two others it didn't mention, and then declares all the apps failures.
There's a lot of questions about the nutritional content of food which you can't answer just by looking at a photo, like "is that a glass of whole milk or non-fat", or "are those vegetables glossy because they're damp or because they're covered in butter". No amount of AI magic is going to solve that.
It will get to the point where it could know to ask those questions, like a human would. Clearly these tools are not there yet, but I think the models are probably good enough for this already.
Maybe in aggregate they are fine if the noise is unbiased and you do some things like correct it when it says an apple is tikka masala, but yeah, someone using this and lying to themselves about the calorie content of junk/comfort food seems pretty likely.
I work for a company that offers nutrition tracking on an app in the App Store.
We are not shipping camera functionality yet. But our concept is to not necessarily guarantee the accuracy of portions but to make lookup easier.
We also spent the time to get the AI integrated with a verified database. This made our results far more accurate.
We tended to find that without the lookup the calories and macros would be generally correct. The math was usually within a margin of error of 5%. This was acceptable except that… there was no micronutrient values and you couldn’t really adjust the portions at all. The system just dumps the macros and while you can halve something… the user experience isn’t great.
Ultimately, if you want precision: manual entry is the only way to go. I feel like out approach will end up being very great once we work out the kinks. Our search isn’t spectacular and as a team we are learning a lot of about prompt engineering and how to make best use of the AI.
Does that work for homemade food as well? The vast majority of the food we eat is homemade with recipes that don’t have any sort of nutritional information. I’ve always wished there was a simple way to figure out the calories. Taking a picture would be ideal.
For homemade food it should be easier to make reliable estimates of the calorie content, because you know with certainty all the food ingredients and their amounts.
The food ingredients with the highest calorie content, like various kinds of seeds or nuts or flour or meal or oil or fat or sugar or dried fruits or dairy products, come usually with calorie estimates from their vendors.
For other ingredients, like various kinds of meat or of fresh vegetables or fruits, there are online databases with typical nutritional information, like the USDA database. Some of that information can even be found in the corresponding Wikipedia pages.
Weighing everything (rather than using volumetric measures) is generally going to be the BEST way to ensure consistency and accuracy.
What's also important is that, in general, even if you are 20% off on something (e.g. I logged 2200 calories but I actually consumed 2600 calories) AND you are planning to eat at a caloric deficit, this usually will mean that you will still lose weight or body recomp. It'll just take a little more time.
But if you are just not tracking, it's _so easy_ to miscalculate your intake to the point where you think "oh this isn't that bad." However, the truth is you consumed 4200 calories and that's a big surplus.
So I/we tend to find the value partially in "simple tracking" to get you aware of what you are actually consuming and then find that transitioning to specific portions to be helpful for "dialing in" and achieving specific targets/goals.
Yes, I would think that would work better indeed. As a augmentation or help tool. I would love to be able to say to MyFitnessPal that 'I ate this and that food, same as usual, and oh yeah drank this.' Just as a easier input interface. I wouldn't trust a pure AI solution without some proper database behind it.
Yeah. The big problem is that "augmentation" is hard because we (humans) have an internal process for how we think about things that is hard to define and building a flowchart for how we understand foods doesn't even necessarily capture things. Very well. You can take something like "chocolate chip pancakes" where the context can be "<brand> <item>" or "<modifier> <food item>". And then you can search.
But even though we've integrated it with a good food database, the process of searching isn't great because sometimes things like brand names don't get recognized and/or modifiers may get confused because... is it a brand? Is it a way of preparing something?
Ultimately we are working on improving how our search works by not just searching by the name, but by getting information about brand, the product, and possible serving options as well. These would better inform the search and allow us to, say, fallback without a brand if we can't find the brand.
The other problem has to do with variant detection. I can say "kirkland sous vide egg bites" but there are 3-4 variants of them. And right now most databases are just "here is the item you requested" without looking at possible variants, which is a problem that we are going to end up solving ourselves.
It's been interesting because we've learned a lot about how people "think" it should work vs. how it actually works.
I've had pretty good results using the AI features in Macrofactor. It's certainly not perfect, but it does a pretty good job with mixed text and photos and allows you to easily fine-tune the results.
Macrofactor is also the only app I've seen that actually estimates your underlying metabolic rate and adjusts accordingly. It predates the recent AI surge, and seems to have a team that's studied nutrition science behind it.
Same. I was very skeptical when Macrofactor introduced this feature, but have since been incredibly impressed. The ability to give it text alongside a photo and then adjust the results (broken out by ingredients) are critical. I’ve also been taking pictures of food sitting on scales and it will take the measurement into account.
Seems like the Macrofactor team took their time developing this feature, as it felt like they were one of the last to roll it out, but the extra polish definitely shows and was worth the wait.
I think the key difference is that they perform a search of the foods in Macrofactor's database which means that you're more likely to get a good estimate.
From someone who weighed and scanned a lot of foods, it has really improved the workflow
I’ve tried a few AI-powered calorie tracking tools too. At first it felt super convenient, just take a photo and get the numbers.
But over time I kept seeing mistakes. Sometimes it would even tag a salad as soup.
Eventually I went back to the old way. Fewer photos, more mindful eating. Honestly I feel better that way.
Honestly this is it for me. Im actively trying to reduce my reliance on tech, even more so when it comes to gimmick tech. A nightly walk with no phone will make you drop pounds too...
I genuinely can’t understand why anyone would even TRY using these apps. Of course they’re going to be terrible, but how could anyone with a modicum of intelligence suspect otherwise?
The founder of parrotpal (another AI calorie tracking app, supporting both text and photos) points out that using photos is one of the least accurate ways for tracking food: https://www.instagram.com/parrot.pal/reel/DAB9NtfM250/
The author of this article seems to be against the concept of calorie counting as a whole too, but calorie counting does work well for many people. They also bring up intuitive eating as an alternative, but intuitive eating is not intended for weight loss while that's what calorie tracking is usually used for (though it can also be used for maintenance and for weight gain).
Personally, after using MyFitnessPal for a couple years, switching to ParrotPal made calorie counting way less time-I just need to give it a quick text (or voice) description and it does a surprisingly good job of estimating. There are a few times when I need to adjust it, I mostly try to overestimate. It's not perfectly accurate but it gives me enough accuracy to have successfully lost and kept my weight off.
> seems to be against the concept of calorie counting as a whole too
What are peoples criticisms of calorie counting? Its the only thing that keeps my weight from creeping up. There are way to many calorie dense foods that can easily sneak in if im thoughtless. (I want my 20 year old life style back :( )
My unprofessional nutritional advice is: do what works for you! So if that’s calorie counting: great! No need to give it a second thought.
But if you are interested in critiques, a fair summary might be: calorie counting is at best extremely imprecise, both on how we measure the calories in food and how we estimate energy expenditure by activities. A little googling should lead to numerous discussions. I really enjoy the podcast maintenance phase, and even if you don’t want to listen to the episode they helpfully include tons of links: https://maintenancephase.buzzsprout.com/1411126/episodes/106...
The first one is very accessible, the second one very posh. But the underlying approach is the same: no calorie counting, just good food in the right proportions.
Good food in the right proportions is necessary, but not sufficient. The total amount of food is at least as important.
I eat only good food in the right proportions. However, it would be enough to double the amount of the food that I eat at one meal, for the next day to see a few hundred grams of additional weight.
I must plan the amount of food to be eaten before starting to eat. Otherwise, I could eat effortlessly not only the double of the amount that I have planned, but even the triple amount or more, with a corresponding increase in the weight gain.
Perhaps there are people who might stop automatically from eating, before ingesting too much, but I am not one of them and looking around I have never met one of those people.
For myself and for most people that I have seen (with the extremely rare exceptions of those people who remain thin despite claiming to eat as much as they can, and who may actually have impaired food digestion or absorption) hoping to stop naturally before overeating does not work. The only thing that works is deciding how much to eat before starting to eat, then never eating more than that. For planning how much to eat, calorie counting works fine.
I said "no calorie counting", not "eat as much as you please". And by "right proportions" in those books they mean something specific: roughly 50% fat, 25% proteins, 25% carbs, plus a balanced mix of different fats, slow carbs, etc.
The laws of thermodynamics obviously hold for nutrition as for any other phenomena. In order to lose wait you have to eat less, no question about that. But the idea is that it's much easier to directly control what you eat than how much you eat. And by following those diets it's allegedly easier to eat the right amount.
I absolutely believe your method works. As for me, I've experienced that since I changed my diet as per the above recommendations, I'm not hungry two hours after each meal anymore.
tayo42 asked for something less tedious than counting calories, so I suggested they take a look at an alternative approach which has benefited me, and in my opinion is well argued.
I agree that calorie counting in the strict meaning is not necessary.
What is necessary is to measure your food, either by mass or by volume, before starting to eat it. For any food that you eat, you should decide some standard portion size that you find by experiment to be suitable for you and you must always eat the standard portion, not random quantities at your whim.
Then, after seeing that you have gained weight after eating 5 spoons of food X, you should decrease the amount to 4 spoons, and so on until you reach amounts of food that keep your weight constant.
What is also important is that for this adjustment you should not decrease or increase the amounts for food items that provide proteins, essential fatty substances, vitamins and minerals, but only the amounts for food items that provide mostly energy, i.e. carbohydrates or non-essential fats.
This is much easier to do when you cook the food yourself, so you control the amounts for each ingredient, than when you buy industrially-produced food, where they have the incentive of mixing every beneficial food ingredient with other ingredients that provide only energy (e.g. starch, sugar, cheap vegetable oils), because the latter are much cheaper than the ingredients that provide essential nutrients, while being tasty or even addictive.
I also read that counting calories is so inaccurate that you may die of starvation or become obese, on the same diet. That is, if you exclusively ate what you measured, and all of it.
Counting calories presumably works (when it does) because it’s combined with more nutritious, regular meals, better awareness, etc. It’s also possible that the measurement errors even out over time, but I suspect the timescale is too long (if you’ve undereaten for two days you’ll end up eating something out of the diet).
Counting calories has low accuracy for various reasons, e.g. for variances in the percentages of food digestion and of nutrient absorption, even in the same individual. There are also appearances of low accuracy caused by the fact that the body adjusts the energy allocated for various internal processes in order to compensate the variances in daily energy intake, but this capacity of compensation is finite and it can be overridden by changing sufficiently the daily energy intake, i.e. the calorie count.
Nevertheless, if done correctly you can never die of starvation or become obese, because you must not aim for a theoretical value, but for the value which you find by experiment that it keeps your weight constant.
I have been obese for many years and after many failed attempts to lose weight I was believing that kind of BS that for some people it may be impossible to control their weight.
However, I had always failed because I had always done it wrongly. After I had started counting calories properly, in less than a year I have lost more than a third of my body weight and since then I maintain whatever body weight I believe to be the right value.
The difference between "before" and "after" is that I have switched from eating when I felt like it and until believing to have had enough, to only eating after making a plan of what to eat during that day, and in which quantities, according to the calories limit, and then sticking to the plan made in the morning and never eating anything extra, not even a snack or a sweetened beverage.
During the initial time, when losing weight, absolutely essential was the use of accurate weighing scales, with resolution of 0.1 kg or better, in order to check my weight each day at the same hour and reduce the calorie limit whenever the weight was not less by 0.1 kg than the weight of the previous day (with some smoothing to avoid overshooting, especially because it appears that there is a delay of several days between reducing the calorie limit to a value that forces a continuous weight reduction and the start of the actual weight decreasing).
After losing weight, I had to continue counting calories, otherwise I would not keep my desired weight. If I do not eat according to a plan, according to a calorie limit, I gain weight extremely easily, at a rate at least 6 to 10 times greater than the rate at which I can lose again the added weight.
For an example of a calorie limit, I am a male of average height and with a sedentary lifestyle, even if I do at least a half of hour per day of exercising, including weight lifting. In order to keep the weight for a BMI of about 25, I have to eat in the range of 1800 to 1900 kcal/day (which I do in 2 meals per day, each slightly above 900 kcal).
There have been a few nutritional studies done in USA and linked recently on HN. Like in other similar studies, the diets used for the subjects were around 2400 to 2500 kcal/day. I have no idea about which may be the difference between me and the subjects of those studies, but if I ate 2400 kcal/day I would become obese in a few weeks, gaining weight by up to a couple of pounds per day.
The only difference that I am aware of is that my food is cooked by myself from high-quality raw ingredients, while the subjects of those studies were eating mostly industrially-produced food, so my "calories" may be "bigger" than their "calories" (i.e. more of the food being actually digested and absorbed).
> Counting calories presumably works (when it does) because it’s combined with more nutritious, regular meals, better awareness, etc.
This is what critics don't get. Calorie counting is what makes people have better awareness, and what makes people aware of what meal is more nutritious.
When you're in the weeds of this stuff it's hard to remember, but many people honestly don't know what are caloric equivalents of different foods, and that's pretty important information if you're trying to eat better.
It is a beyond stupid argument. What is imprecise is not counting calories at all. It is so easy to fool yourself and think you are eating 30% less calories than you really are. You also can get an idea of your micro nutrient breakdown and what you might be lacking.
People screw it up by trying to measure energy expenditure is the problem I consistently see.
There is never a reason to do this: people do it because they want to eat more, so they want to factor exercise in.
They're basically already sabotaging the process from the outset: the goal is generally weightloss, they have an easy and precise way to track that, and one week of "under eating" isn't going to kill anyone.
People tend to overestimate the amount of calories they can burn through increased activity or exercise.
Walking a mile will burn about 100 calories, give or take. That's not much. A latte from Starbucks or a "healthy" snack such as a granola bar has more.
Good rule of thumb is that you cannot offset a bad diet with exercise for weight loss. Diet is by far more impactful. Exercise has other benefits though, which I'm not intending to dismiss.
Sure, but not counting calories is even more imprecise. For many of us our built-in "calorimeters" are broken and we need to find other ways to limit intake. For example, restricting food by time or by type of food, or calorie counting.
> What are peoples criticisms of calorie counting?
Probably the same criticism that applies to all "methods to do a thing". That people often miss the forest for the trees and obsess on the wrong metric (counting calories while still ingesting preprocessed industrial food and beverages) instead of the right one (losing weight while being healthy at the same time).
While there is a risk of missing the forest for the trees, I also think that most diets fail because they're too perfect. You don't need to be perfectly healthy, and you don't need to eat 100% whole foods.
When we get into this sort of mindset that we need to be attentive of absolutely everything we eat then we develop a sort of adversarial relationship with food, and for most people that's just not sustainable. The difference between a successful diet that works and one that doesn't could be diet soda. Sounds stupid, but if you're miserable then your diet isn't going to last. Making better decisions is an improvement, and is MUCH better than dropping the pursuit all together.
There's plenty of people who are very healthy and they eat ice cream, drink soda some times, maybe have cheesecake occasionally. That's part of life, and for a lot of people that's one of the parts of life that makes it worth living. Conversely, there's a lot of people who try something like Keto and then eventually fail and fall into an even worse relationship with food then they had when they started.
most people do not arrive at the idea that CICO (Calories In Calories Out) is useless or incorrect on their own - they usually buy into that belief because they follow specific diet communities or health influencers that are incentivized to tell them that.
> Personally, after using MyFitnessPal for a couple years, switching to ParrotPal made calorie counting way less time-I just need to give it a quick text (or voice) description and it does a surprisingly good job of estimating.
I haven't used ParrtPal, what makes it easier than using MyFitnessPal?
- More freeform -- just type what you ate (and add as much detail as you want) and it will log it, nothing more to select or search from after
- You can log several dishes or meals in the same sentence
- You can use voice
With MFP, there was always searching, then selecting the best entry, then fiddling with portion size. It usually ends up taking many times longer for me.
As a gym enthusiast, if this app can’t give me accurate calorie counts and nutrient data, it’s basically useless to me. But for the average person, this is a big deal because we tend to seek convenience and want the easiest path to our goals. If this app wants to truly deliver results, it still has a long way to go.
Fun fact: The founder of Cal AI is just 18 years old.
If you want calorie counting to be of any value to you you're going to want to be accurate. Thankfully we're mostly creatures of habit. Source accurate numbers for everything you eat in a week and you're 90% covered for every other week. I recorded 30 items over two weeks and then added 15 more over 2.5 months. Don't sabotage your efforts with tools that don't work.
CalAI is just objectively a bad app even discounting its AI calorie estimator as an irrelevant gimmick:
* the UX is bad
* the stats are laughable
* charts worse than nothing (really, misleading to look at)
* lacking basic functionality such as “duplicate for today”
* can’t see or export the meal photo
* their “streak” attempt at gamification is so bad it literally cannot count
And yes, the AI there is atrociously bad. Not only can it not reliably detect calorie content (I don’t think anyone could on a basis of a photo in general case), but it so often mislabels food (like the example in article) it’s just a comedic relief. And there’s a “Fix” button which does nothing.
It’s like they never really tried hard. Combined with the general lack of quality, looks like a typical quick money grab riding the AI hype wave. I’m pretty confident the app could be vibe-coded in a week (and that’s generous). Maybe the backend is more complex? Don’t think so as there are no social features, it just stores data.
Paid for a year (Android app) to see how well they applied AI to the field, now continue to use it like a meal photo log with some (manually entered) metadata, otherwise Excel would be a nicer solution.
AI dialed this to the max: The early vibe coding startup catches the worm. Working with designers, doing A/B tests, QA, product management, nowadays all of this will make you lose to the competition.
You just need to get something out that looks as if it works, that makes users feel as if it works, whether it really does or not, whether the quality is atrocious or good.
Exactly. At what seems to be 30 USD a year, that's laughably low for most users. I'm actually impressed on the kids for finding a niche snake oil market and selling it to them.
It's not that consumers don't care -- it's that "they" (i.e. "we") have been beaten down.
Connect an image labeling API to the USDA's database of nutrients, make a slick-looking app, and you have a product. Pay for some marketing, offer a three-day trial after which you auto-bill for a year, make refunds as difficult as possible, and you have a business. At $30/yr, 10k subscriptions (deliberate or accidental) gets you $210k after app store commission. If you're lucky, you get bought out for even more. If not, you still made good money for not much work.
There just isn’t enough info in a photo, even for the world’s leading calorie counting expert, to give a sensible estimate of the calories content. Ans even more so for macros.
Add to that the fact vision is still pretty crap and you have a complete joke that I can’t believe anyone is paying for.
I've used the AI features in Lose It and was pretty impressed, not for the caloric estimate, but when given a picture of a breakfast burrito it accurately split it out into the component parts, from there I could manually adjust amounts easily for food I make without having to manually search out every ingredient manually. As an additional tool it is great.
The issue of course is these new apps built with a sole focus of AI images for tracking. With a photo of restaurant food you can't see a sauce and the 5-10g of additional sugar content, can't get accurate guesses of what is in breads/pastas and figuring out general volumes of foods is not possible unless you have some kind of standard size reference in the frame.
Honestly the best use case i have seen is the ability to read a labels and add it to the database. (Similar to an OCR but better)
Correcting errors in MFP is the bane of my existence.
I have tried some other apps but i hated every single one of them for a reason or another and came back to MFP but that was one of the best features i would really love to have
However bad these algorithms are (and we're talking very wide intervals in multiple dimensions of uncertainty), you could immediately improve the vision/volume calculation part with a modest change - like requiring a size reference. "Place a unit of currency next to the plate, then take at least two photos of the plate from different angles" can get you pretty close to an accurate volume.
If they aren't doing even that much, then they're not very interested in accuracy at all.
The problem is, if you are serious about losing weight, you need to ideally aim for something like a 300 calorie deficit. Much more and you’ll feel shit, a lot less and it’ll be quite slow or go the other way. It’s quite a fine margin and even tracking using bar codes you’re not going to be perfect.
But even more important - you really gotta track your macros if you want it to work well - and again also not feel crap.
There is no way in hell an AI camera is tracking macros well
You can buy zero fat Greek yogurt that has very low sugar. It’s perfect for losing weight. It’s about 50kcals per 100g. And also super high in protein.
Or you can buy yoghurt that is full of sugar and is 100kcals per 100g and has lots of fat and hardly any protein.
Even a human expert could not tell the difference without tasting them.
* Great Value Original Vanilla Lowfat Yogurt, 32 oz
Serving size 3/4 cup (170g)
1.5g fat
26g carbs (21 of which are sugar)
5g protein
130 kcal
* Great Value Greek Plain Nonfat Yogurt, 32 oz Tub
Serving size 2/3 cup (170g)
7g carbs (7 of which are sugar)
17g protein
100 kcal
* Great Value Light Vanilla Nonfat Yogurt, 32 oz
Serving size 3/4 cup (170g)
15g carbs (12 of which are sugar)
5g protein
80 kcal
If it's only got 50kcal per 100g, then I assume you've got to be relying heavily on indigestible gelling agents to keep the texture reading to the customers as yogurt. I assume that the developer would suggest that a zero-calorie bowl of water and indigestible gelling agents that reads to YOU as yogurt, is not accurately summarized as yogurt, and that this would be a case of user error.
My mistake. This is very close to the greek yogurt I mentioned, but the serving size is different - I was using 170g recommended serving size instead of the standard 100g comparator. Also - all 3g carbs are sugar (naturally occurring).
What’s interesting to me is a tool can be terrible at its stated problem and still add value.
I suspect many of the results dieters get is “mere measurement”, e.g. it helps them be more thoughtful, seek education, etc.
So the value of the tool is in its ability to keep them engaged and hopeful (the unstated need), and the actual mechanic doesn’t have to be that good at the stated need.
If I diligently track calories using one of these things and don't lose weight I'll say "screw it" and stop bothering because obviously counting calories doesn't work. I think this is much more likely to be the case because even proper calorie counting is difficult and frustrating
There is a study somewhere that said people who wanted to lose weight and simply tracked their calories (without any attempt at reducing them) LOST weight vs those who did nothing. Awareness alone is valuable.
Yeah. It doesn’t take much imagination to figure out that a Coke Zero looks identical to regular Coca Cola, yet they have vastly different calorie content, to put it mildly.
Sauces loaded with butter, sugar or other goodies will of course be the same story.
I used MyFitnessPal to lose 15kg a few years ago and I have a theory that the act of calorie counting (ie the effort of working it out and labour of putting it into the app) is a key part of why it works. It becomes just slightly more effort to eat something and it makes you stop and think. Making it easier I would expect to make it also easier to eat more.
I find a similar thing with budgeting apps. Manually tracking requires effort and for you to think twice before every purchase, whereas automatic transaction syncing with your bank means you can just not think about it.
In the case of dieting/calorie counting - I don't think you can get away with not thinking about it, especially with inaccurate estimates.
As someone who lost nearly 100lbs (about 45kg) calorie counting and working out, this was a big part of it.
It also just made me cognizant of my bad eating habits. I’d absent-mindedly snack on something, go to log it, then think “wait, why am I eating this right now?” and stop.
It’s essential educating yourself on nutrition through habit.
Yes, macros were key as I was doing a pretty intensive 4-day HIIT program at the time.
I actually aimed strictly for my maintenance calories as I was burning 700-900cal in exercise per workout day. Was very hard work, but rewarding.
It took about a year to drop that much weight, normally I think it would take longer but I had a very dedicated group trainer helping me stay on track.
That's cool that it worked with your maintenance calories. was that calculated a maintenance for sedentary lifestyle and the exercise was on top, or did you also eat the exercise calories and still lost weight?
The former - the ultimate goal was to get myself comfortable with eating in a way that would keep me at a stable weight and stick with it. I knew this was going to be the hardest part of the lifestyle change, so I opted for a more difficult up front program to ensure I could focus on that while I lost weight.
I think that's something that a lot of people fail to account for when trying to lose weight that ultimately ruins their goals - you have to build habits to sustain the lifestyle you want. Weight loss surgery, eating at a large deficit or working out hard alone are going to get rid of some weight, but most people will gain all of that back within a year's time.
Yes!! I used an app called Waistline 2 years ago to keep myself on a brutal diet. I did < 1500 calories per day for 2 months. Lost 9kg. Came out with the same insight: the hassle of meticulously keeping track helps with the restraint.
Others have found that CalAI likely uses Gemini 1.5 (not sure which variant) which is used because it's very cheap, not for its accuracy.
I understand the fundamental issues with calorie counting via photo analysis/LLM. However these articles would be more interesting if they included comparison with results from actual cutting-edge LLMs, rather than the budget models. I acknowledge that apps don't use these models though to protect margins and lower cost.
Also:
> Cameras capture two-dimensional images of three-dimensional objects.
iPhone camera captures depth, too. I don't think it's being used in CalAI though. This article is more about current commercialized solutions rather than analysis of state of the art capability.
idk tbh asking an llm to estimate calories seems like such a -bad idea- on the first place, that doesnt seem that having a better model would improve results much.
They don't, but that doesn't stop them from lying about it on their homepage.
> Snap a photo with Cal AI, and your phone's depth sensor calculates food volume. Our AI then analyzes and breaks down your meal to determine calories, protein, carbs, and fat.
Oh interesting. I wouldn't put it past them that they include that data in the input though. Why are you certain they don't? (I guess that they don't, too, because someone reported getting identical calorie readings from giving photos to Gemini 1.5 directly)
They’re using some off the shelf multimodal LLM API, perhaps Gemini 1.5 or something else. And no off the shelf VLM API is capable of handling 4 channel images (RGB+D).
You can take crude measurements from the depth map and provide as text. Or perhaps provide the depth map as an image next to the actual image as those are certainly in training data. I haven’t tested these
How many times a day and how many unique food items does one need to eat to continually remain so hopelessly unfamiliar with their caloric intake that they need an app to track it?
What role can AI possibly have in this, when all you need to do is either turn around the packaging or do a web search for the dish you cook to get a number?
By enabling you to think in terms of what you ate, rather than numbers. If you eat a varied but regular diet, this enables you to stop having to track. You'll just know your approximate caloric budget and intake for the day, and what that means in terms of food items.
When you have to take ownership of your diet (and thus your weight), that means a permanent lifestyle change. Tracking is simply not sustainable indefinitely, so you must establish better consumption habits while you do so, that will stick past the tracking. Tracking and getting to know what you eat, rather than tracking your calories, is what enables you to form such a habit and knowledge base.
Eating random stuff and thus having to use AI due to a lack of easily accessible and personally learnable nutrition information makes a total mockery of this process, and runs pretty much antithetical to it.
AI aside we don't really know how many calories a given person will get from eating a given piece of food. We measure food's calories by burning it, but we don't get nearly all that energy from dissolving it (just consider the fact that solid human waste burns, for instance). At best we've established some (fairly broad) minima and maxima.
Presumably the recommended daily calorie intake figures (and the calculators for these) do to some extent take this into account? i.e. I would imagine they're based on experimentally tested values rather than theoretical energy expenditure.
add to that food calorie labels arent required to be 100% accurate, there's an acceptable range like +/- 20% iirc. That's enough to throw off a precise deficit. Calorie counting is more about directionally helping you lower your food consumption but it isnt as accurate as people think.
Honestly the main thing was learning that perfectly satisfying food I cook at home tends to land around 600-800 cal for a meal, where eating out almost anywhere is often twice that, even if my beverage is water. Just being aware how how heavy those otherwise delightful meals are gives me pause. Granted these figures are all a side effect of my personal eating habits and preferences, but that's rather the point of the exercise isn't it? There's a lot of individual variation, and the individual is probably best served by a personalized approach.
If I'm smart, I can offset this by eating half of that meal in the restaurant and taking the rest in a to-go container. Two meals for the price of one, and reheating in the oven is almost as convenient.
Separately though, I have no idea why restaurants seem to exclusively offer gigantic portions over here. I wonder how common this is elsewhere in the world? I'm not well traveled so I genuinely have no idea.
We don't get it from raw bomb calorimetry ("Burn it and measure how hot it gets"). There are additional absorption coefficients applied before the nutrition label is printed. But for proteins, fats, and simple carbohydrates the coefficients are quite high (~95%), while progressively more complex carbs have a declining curve that ends in indigestible fiber. The difficulty is that the same person will digest more or less of the protein in their hamburger depending on how many fries they ate, how greasy those fries were, whether they ate lunch, and how much beer they drank that night. It's variable.
While this is strictly true - measurement of calories gives the upper bound of possible energy absorption. This makes it sufficient to calculate if TotalCaloriesIn >= TotalCaloriesOut. Obviously there are some biological complexities - but within the boundaries of the system the outcomes are constrained by the laws of thermodynamics.
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[ 5.7 ms ] story [ 271 ms ] threadThese apps with graphs are just selling you a sense of control, of compulsive metric driven decision making. Its partly the consumers’ own fault – many people won’t care even if they knew. But it’s also predatory by the companies. It’s consumer tech in a nutshell: put a pretty but shitty app on the App Store, spend 80% on marketing, show ads in the free tier, sell overpriced premium offerings to those who are careless with money, rinse and repeat. I follow some subreddits and groups for ”entrepreneurs” and it’s just like this.
I used calorie counter apps before and they helped me lose weight (by mostly educating me what to eat/avoid). With these apps, I feel like the core premise - counting calories - isn’t even working and they’re selling people hopes and dreams. That’s danger territory.
Source?
(Not to defend the app itself obviously)
They're solicited, right?
In the best scenario we are in a TornadoGuard (https://xkcd.com/937/) situation. More likely the developers are paying for reviews
Have you verified that these are mostly accurate?
Initially I verified against labels by eating the serving size precisely. Then, I switched to weighing and doing the math on random days or meals.
For some items I would tell it the calories and macros and it would remember (a pb spoon is a common treat around my house).
It's good.
But like all food journalling the benefits are not so much having macro balances or tallies, its in making you aware and making you think about what you're eating. That alone takes you out of autopilot and lets you eat better.
It's just bad at math. So I would ask it to output a json struct for each day, that I could inspect by sight, then I'd save that and had a python script to actually tally.
I had predictive analytics and the whole 9 yards. Maybe I should have started a business! https://jodavaho.io/tags/diet.html
You are providing accurate info to an LLM and it is assisting you with information processing.
These apps are trying to just take a picture of arbitrary food and just trusting a neural network to be magical and tell you the macros in the food from a photo.
Honestly curious if that would have improved the author's experience.
It's local-first so you control this sensitive information. It features easy reuse and exercise tracking.
I exploit my "frugality" neuroses by treating calories as an expense.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44185892
There's a lot of questions about the nutritional content of food which you can't answer just by looking at a photo, like "is that a glass of whole milk or non-fat", or "are those vegetables glossy because they're damp or because they're covered in butter". No amount of AI magic is going to solve that.
We are not shipping camera functionality yet. But our concept is to not necessarily guarantee the accuracy of portions but to make lookup easier.
We also spent the time to get the AI integrated with a verified database. This made our results far more accurate.
We tended to find that without the lookup the calories and macros would be generally correct. The math was usually within a margin of error of 5%. This was acceptable except that… there was no micronutrient values and you couldn’t really adjust the portions at all. The system just dumps the macros and while you can halve something… the user experience isn’t great.
Ultimately, if you want precision: manual entry is the only way to go. I feel like out approach will end up being very great once we work out the kinks. Our search isn’t spectacular and as a team we are learning a lot of about prompt engineering and how to make best use of the AI.
The food ingredients with the highest calorie content, like various kinds of seeds or nuts or flour or meal or oil or fat or sugar or dried fruits or dairy products, come usually with calorie estimates from their vendors.
For other ingredients, like various kinds of meat or of fresh vegetables or fruits, there are online databases with typical nutritional information, like the USDA database. Some of that information can even be found in the corresponding Wikipedia pages.
Weighing everything (rather than using volumetric measures) is generally going to be the BEST way to ensure consistency and accuracy.
What's also important is that, in general, even if you are 20% off on something (e.g. I logged 2200 calories but I actually consumed 2600 calories) AND you are planning to eat at a caloric deficit, this usually will mean that you will still lose weight or body recomp. It'll just take a little more time.
But if you are just not tracking, it's _so easy_ to miscalculate your intake to the point where you think "oh this isn't that bad." However, the truth is you consumed 4200 calories and that's a big surplus.
So I/we tend to find the value partially in "simple tracking" to get you aware of what you are actually consuming and then find that transitioning to specific portions to be helpful for "dialing in" and achieving specific targets/goals.
But even though we've integrated it with a good food database, the process of searching isn't great because sometimes things like brand names don't get recognized and/or modifiers may get confused because... is it a brand? Is it a way of preparing something?
Ultimately we are working on improving how our search works by not just searching by the name, but by getting information about brand, the product, and possible serving options as well. These would better inform the search and allow us to, say, fallback without a brand if we can't find the brand.
The other problem has to do with variant detection. I can say "kirkland sous vide egg bites" but there are 3-4 variants of them. And right now most databases are just "here is the item you requested" without looking at possible variants, which is a problem that we are going to end up solving ourselves.
It's been interesting because we've learned a lot about how people "think" it should work vs. how it actually works.
Macrofactor is also the only app I've seen that actually estimates your underlying metabolic rate and adjusts accordingly. It predates the recent AI surge, and seems to have a team that's studied nutrition science behind it.
Seems like the Macrofactor team took their time developing this feature, as it felt like they were one of the last to roll it out, but the extra polish definitely shows and was worth the wait.
From someone who weighed and scanned a lot of foods, it has really improved the workflow
Users also seem to like using photos less than text for food tracking: https://www.instagram.com/p/DBoSeQzM3bQ/
The author of this article seems to be against the concept of calorie counting as a whole too, but calorie counting does work well for many people. They also bring up intuitive eating as an alternative, but intuitive eating is not intended for weight loss while that's what calorie tracking is usually used for (though it can also be used for maintenance and for weight gain).
Personally, after using MyFitnessPal for a couple years, switching to ParrotPal made calorie counting way less time-I just need to give it a quick text (or voice) description and it does a surprisingly good job of estimating. There are a few times when I need to adjust it, I mostly try to overestimate. It's not perfectly accurate but it gives me enough accuracy to have successfully lost and kept my weight off.
What are peoples criticisms of calorie counting? Its the only thing that keeps my weight from creeping up. There are way to many calorie dense foods that can easily sneak in if im thoughtless. (I want my 20 year old life style back :( )
But if you are interested in critiques, a fair summary might be: calorie counting is at best extremely imprecise, both on how we measure the calories in food and how we estimate energy expenditure by activities. A little googling should lead to numerous discussions. I really enjoy the podcast maintenance phase, and even if you don’t want to listen to the episode they helpfully include tons of links: https://maintenancephase.buzzsprout.com/1411126/episodes/106...
It does work for me, but being vigilant about it is tedious so I'm open to hearing if people have better ways.
- David Ludwig, Always Hungry?
- Mark Hyman, The Blood Sugar Solution
The first one is very accessible, the second one very posh. But the underlying approach is the same: no calorie counting, just good food in the right proportions.
I eat only good food in the right proportions. However, it would be enough to double the amount of the food that I eat at one meal, for the next day to see a few hundred grams of additional weight.
I must plan the amount of food to be eaten before starting to eat. Otherwise, I could eat effortlessly not only the double of the amount that I have planned, but even the triple amount or more, with a corresponding increase in the weight gain.
Perhaps there are people who might stop automatically from eating, before ingesting too much, but I am not one of them and looking around I have never met one of those people.
For myself and for most people that I have seen (with the extremely rare exceptions of those people who remain thin despite claiming to eat as much as they can, and who may actually have impaired food digestion or absorption) hoping to stop naturally before overeating does not work. The only thing that works is deciding how much to eat before starting to eat, then never eating more than that. For planning how much to eat, calorie counting works fine.
I said "no calorie counting", not "eat as much as you please". And by "right proportions" in those books they mean something specific: roughly 50% fat, 25% proteins, 25% carbs, plus a balanced mix of different fats, slow carbs, etc.
The laws of thermodynamics obviously hold for nutrition as for any other phenomena. In order to lose wait you have to eat less, no question about that. But the idea is that it's much easier to directly control what you eat than how much you eat. And by following those diets it's allegedly easier to eat the right amount.
I absolutely believe your method works. As for me, I've experienced that since I changed my diet as per the above recommendations, I'm not hungry two hours after each meal anymore.
tayo42 asked for something less tedious than counting calories, so I suggested they take a look at an alternative approach which has benefited me, and in my opinion is well argued.
What is necessary is to measure your food, either by mass or by volume, before starting to eat it. For any food that you eat, you should decide some standard portion size that you find by experiment to be suitable for you and you must always eat the standard portion, not random quantities at your whim.
Then, after seeing that you have gained weight after eating 5 spoons of food X, you should decrease the amount to 4 spoons, and so on until you reach amounts of food that keep your weight constant.
What is also important is that for this adjustment you should not decrease or increase the amounts for food items that provide proteins, essential fatty substances, vitamins and minerals, but only the amounts for food items that provide mostly energy, i.e. carbohydrates or non-essential fats.
This is much easier to do when you cook the food yourself, so you control the amounts for each ingredient, than when you buy industrially-produced food, where they have the incentive of mixing every beneficial food ingredient with other ingredients that provide only energy (e.g. starch, sugar, cheap vegetable oils), because the latter are much cheaper than the ingredients that provide essential nutrients, while being tasty or even addictive.
Counting calories presumably works (when it does) because it’s combined with more nutritious, regular meals, better awareness, etc. It’s also possible that the measurement errors even out over time, but I suspect the timescale is too long (if you’ve undereaten for two days you’ll end up eating something out of the diet).
Nevertheless, if done correctly you can never die of starvation or become obese, because you must not aim for a theoretical value, but for the value which you find by experiment that it keeps your weight constant.
I have been obese for many years and after many failed attempts to lose weight I was believing that kind of BS that for some people it may be impossible to control their weight.
However, I had always failed because I had always done it wrongly. After I had started counting calories properly, in less than a year I have lost more than a third of my body weight and since then I maintain whatever body weight I believe to be the right value.
The difference between "before" and "after" is that I have switched from eating when I felt like it and until believing to have had enough, to only eating after making a plan of what to eat during that day, and in which quantities, according to the calories limit, and then sticking to the plan made in the morning and never eating anything extra, not even a snack or a sweetened beverage.
During the initial time, when losing weight, absolutely essential was the use of accurate weighing scales, with resolution of 0.1 kg or better, in order to check my weight each day at the same hour and reduce the calorie limit whenever the weight was not less by 0.1 kg than the weight of the previous day (with some smoothing to avoid overshooting, especially because it appears that there is a delay of several days between reducing the calorie limit to a value that forces a continuous weight reduction and the start of the actual weight decreasing).
After losing weight, I had to continue counting calories, otherwise I would not keep my desired weight. If I do not eat according to a plan, according to a calorie limit, I gain weight extremely easily, at a rate at least 6 to 10 times greater than the rate at which I can lose again the added weight.
For an example of a calorie limit, I am a male of average height and with a sedentary lifestyle, even if I do at least a half of hour per day of exercising, including weight lifting. In order to keep the weight for a BMI of about 25, I have to eat in the range of 1800 to 1900 kcal/day (which I do in 2 meals per day, each slightly above 900 kcal).
There have been a few nutritional studies done in USA and linked recently on HN. Like in other similar studies, the diets used for the subjects were around 2400 to 2500 kcal/day. I have no idea about which may be the difference between me and the subjects of those studies, but if I ate 2400 kcal/day I would become obese in a few weeks, gaining weight by up to a couple of pounds per day.
The only difference that I am aware of is that my food is cooked by myself from high-quality raw ingredients, while the subjects of those studies were eating mostly industrially-produced food, so my "calories" may be "bigger" than their "calories" (i.e. more of the food being actually digested and absorbed).
This is what critics don't get. Calorie counting is what makes people have better awareness, and what makes people aware of what meal is more nutritious.
When you're in the weeds of this stuff it's hard to remember, but many people honestly don't know what are caloric equivalents of different foods, and that's pretty important information if you're trying to eat better.
There is never a reason to do this: people do it because they want to eat more, so they want to factor exercise in.
They're basically already sabotaging the process from the outset: the goal is generally weightloss, they have an easy and precise way to track that, and one week of "under eating" isn't going to kill anyone.
Walking a mile will burn about 100 calories, give or take. That's not much. A latte from Starbucks or a "healthy" snack such as a granola bar has more.
Good rule of thumb is that you cannot offset a bad diet with exercise for weight loss. Diet is by far more impactful. Exercise has other benefits though, which I'm not intending to dismiss.
Probably the same criticism that applies to all "methods to do a thing". That people often miss the forest for the trees and obsess on the wrong metric (counting calories while still ingesting preprocessed industrial food and beverages) instead of the right one (losing weight while being healthy at the same time).
When we get into this sort of mindset that we need to be attentive of absolutely everything we eat then we develop a sort of adversarial relationship with food, and for most people that's just not sustainable. The difference between a successful diet that works and one that doesn't could be diet soda. Sounds stupid, but if you're miserable then your diet isn't going to last. Making better decisions is an improvement, and is MUCH better than dropping the pursuit all together.
There's plenty of people who are very healthy and they eat ice cream, drink soda some times, maybe have cheesecake occasionally. That's part of life, and for a lot of people that's one of the parts of life that makes it worth living. Conversely, there's a lot of people who try something like Keto and then eventually fail and fall into an even worse relationship with food then they had when they started.
I haven't used ParrtPal, what makes it easier than using MyFitnessPal?
With MFP, there was always searching, then selecting the best entry, then fiddling with portion size. It usually ends up taking many times longer for me.
Fun fact: The founder of Cal AI is just 18 years old.
* the UX is bad
* the stats are laughable
* charts worse than nothing (really, misleading to look at)
* lacking basic functionality such as “duplicate for today”
* can’t see or export the meal photo
* their “streak” attempt at gamification is so bad it literally cannot count
And yes, the AI there is atrociously bad. Not only can it not reliably detect calorie content (I don’t think anyone could on a basis of a photo in general case), but it so often mislabels food (like the example in article) it’s just a comedic relief. And there’s a “Fix” button which does nothing.
It’s like they never really tried hard. Combined with the general lack of quality, looks like a typical quick money grab riding the AI hype wave. I’m pretty confident the app could be vibe-coded in a week (and that’s generous). Maybe the backend is more complex? Don’t think so as there are no social features, it just stores data.
Paid for a year (Android app) to see how well they applied AI to the field, now continue to use it like a meal photo log with some (manually entered) metadata, otherwise Excel would be a nicer solution.
Consumers just don't care.
AI dialed this to the max: The early vibe coding startup catches the worm. Working with designers, doing A/B tests, QA, product management, nowadays all of this will make you lose to the competition.
You just need to get something out that looks as if it works, that makes users feel as if it works, whether it really does or not, whether the quality is atrocious or good.
Connect an image labeling API to the USDA's database of nutrients, make a slick-looking app, and you have a product. Pay for some marketing, offer a three-day trial after which you auto-bill for a year, make refunds as difficult as possible, and you have a business. At $30/yr, 10k subscriptions (deliberate or accidental) gets you $210k after app store commission. If you're lucky, you get bought out for even more. If not, you still made good money for not much work.
There just isn’t enough info in a photo, even for the world’s leading calorie counting expert, to give a sensible estimate of the calories content. Ans even more so for macros.
Add to that the fact vision is still pretty crap and you have a complete joke that I can’t believe anyone is paying for.
<https://scarygoround.com/badmachinery/index.html?pg=374#show...>
The issue of course is these new apps built with a sole focus of AI images for tracking. With a photo of restaurant food you can't see a sauce and the 5-10g of additional sugar content, can't get accurate guesses of what is in breads/pastas and figuring out general volumes of foods is not possible unless you have some kind of standard size reference in the frame.
Correcting errors in MFP is the bane of my existence.
I have tried some other apps but i hated every single one of them for a reason or another and came back to MFP but that was one of the best features i would really love to have
If they aren't doing even that much, then they're not very interested in accuracy at all.
But even more important - you really gotta track your macros if you want it to work well - and again also not feel crap.
There is no way in hell an AI camera is tracking macros well
- The food is inside containers of a standard size, which the model can use as a volumetric reference
- Optimally, the containers are clear plastic, for depth approximation
- The food is homogenous, or mostly-homogenous. Dishes containing a lot of mixed ingredients seem like an intractable problem to me
Now, whether or not abilities like this are useful to you would seem heavily dependent on your diet.
Yoghurt.
You can buy zero fat Greek yogurt that has very low sugar. It’s perfect for losing weight. It’s about 50kcals per 100g. And also super high in protein.
Or you can buy yoghurt that is full of sugar and is 100kcals per 100g and has lots of fat and hardly any protein.
Even a human expert could not tell the difference without tasting them.
This is just one example of many.
* Great Value Original Vanilla Lowfat Yogurt, 32 oz
Serving size 3/4 cup (170g)
1.5g fat
26g carbs (21 of which are sugar)
5g protein
130 kcal
* Great Value Greek Plain Nonfat Yogurt, 32 oz Tub
Serving size 2/3 cup (170g)
7g carbs (7 of which are sugar)
17g protein
100 kcal
* Great Value Light Vanilla Nonfat Yogurt, 32 oz
Serving size 3/4 cup (170g)
15g carbs (12 of which are sugar)
5g protein
80 kcal
If it's only got 50kcal per 100g, then I assume you've got to be relying heavily on indigestible gelling agents to keep the texture reading to the customers as yogurt. I assume that the developer would suggest that a zero-calorie bowl of water and indigestible gelling agents that reads to YOU as yogurt, is not accurately summarized as yogurt, and that this would be a case of user error.
This is the yoghurt I was talking about. It’s a high quality brand here in the UK
54kal per 100g and 10g protein
3g carbs (zero of which sugar)
Ingredients: Pasteurised Skimmed Milk, Live Active Yoghurt Cultures (L. Bulgaricus, S. Thermophilus, L. Acidophilus, Bifidus, L. Casei)
I suspect many of the results dieters get is “mere measurement”, e.g. it helps them be more thoughtful, seek education, etc.
So the value of the tool is in its ability to keep them engaged and hopeful (the unstated need), and the actual mechanic doesn’t have to be that good at the stated need.
If I diligently track calories using one of these things and don't lose weight I'll say "screw it" and stop bothering because obviously counting calories doesn't work. I think this is much more likely to be the case because even proper calorie counting is difficult and frustrating
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12064450/#:~:text=T...
Maybe this one: https://today.duke.edu/2019/02/tracking-food-leads-losing-po...
Sauces loaded with butter, sugar or other goodies will of course be the same story.
In the case of dieting/calorie counting - I don't think you can get away with not thinking about it, especially with inaccurate estimates.
It also just made me cognizant of my bad eating habits. I’d absent-mindedly snack on something, go to log it, then think “wait, why am I eating this right now?” and stop.
It’s essential educating yourself on nutrition through habit.
I actually aimed strictly for my maintenance calories as I was burning 700-900cal in exercise per workout day. Was very hard work, but rewarding.
It took about a year to drop that much weight, normally I think it would take longer but I had a very dedicated group trainer helping me stay on track.
I think that's something that a lot of people fail to account for when trying to lose weight that ultimately ruins their goals - you have to build habits to sustain the lifestyle you want. Weight loss surgery, eating at a large deficit or working out hard alone are going to get rid of some weight, but most people will gain all of that back within a year's time.
Where does the author take the 120 number from? The very link they gave says a large pink lady apple is 78 calories.
I understand the fundamental issues with calorie counting via photo analysis/LLM. However these articles would be more interesting if they included comparison with results from actual cutting-edge LLMs, rather than the budget models. I acknowledge that apps don't use these models though to protect margins and lower cost.
Also:
> Cameras capture two-dimensional images of three-dimensional objects.
iPhone camera captures depth, too. I don't think it's being used in CalAI though. This article is more about current commercialized solutions rather than analysis of state of the art capability.
They don't, but that doesn't stop them from lying about it on their homepage.
> Snap a photo with Cal AI, and your phone's depth sensor calculates food volume. Our AI then analyzes and breaks down your meal to determine calories, protein, carbs, and fat.
The grift must go on.
https://vlmsarebiased.github.io/
another decade and we'll be able to get the Not Hotdog app from Silicon Valley
What role can AI possibly have in this, when all you need to do is either turn around the packaging or do a web search for the dish you cook to get a number?
"track" is important here
How packaging or a web search will help with exactly remembering how much was eaten in past?
When you have to take ownership of your diet (and thus your weight), that means a permanent lifestyle change. Tracking is simply not sustainable indefinitely, so you must establish better consumption habits while you do so, that will stick past the tracking. Tracking and getting to know what you eat, rather than tracking your calories, is what enables you to form such a habit and knowledge base.
Eating random stuff and thus having to use AI due to a lack of easily accessible and personally learnable nutrition information makes a total mockery of this process, and runs pretty much antithetical to it.
(PS: doesn't mean there aren't real use cases. Sadly the term AI has been stretched to cover all kinds of charlatanery)
Humans (unlike say cows) do not digest parts of what is available in plants, which makes some vegetables filling and ultra-low caloric.
"we don't really know how many calories a given person will get from eating a given piece of food"
exact numbers of unknown, but difference is not so great, except truly extreme cases (and vast majority of fat people is not fat due to them)
Why does every major restaurant feature individual meals with a caloric intake of an entire day’s energy?
Separately though, I have no idea why restaurants seem to exclusively offer gigantic portions over here. I wonder how common this is elsewhere in the world? I'm not well traveled so I genuinely have no idea.
Let's say I eat 3 hamburgers per day and gain ~1kg per month.
If I reduce that to 2 hamburgers per day I maintain my weight.
And when I reduce that to 1 hamburger per day I lose ~1kg per month.
That is simple. As for how I feel while eating 1 hamburger that's another question.
I can try to improve the machinery of my body by e.g exercising, eating healthier food, adjusting my macros, taking supplements, etc.
So now I can eat 1.5 hamburgers per day and I feel better and still lose 1kg per month.