I prefer efficient manual entry to vibe-coding calories. I built my own Java-based SPA: https://frequal.com/cf/
It's local-first so you control this sensitive information. It features easy reuse and exercise tracking.
I used AI-powered calorie counting apps, and they were even worse than expected
11–20 of 302 posts
Re: I used AI-powered calorie counting apps, and they were even worse than expected
#12Gimmicky 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 tim…
>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. Have you verified that these are mostly accurate?
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"
Re: I used AI-powered calorie counting apps, and they were even worse than expected
#13Gimmicky 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 tim…
>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. Have you verified that these are mostly accurate?
Yes, a lot initially and now I’ve looked at them so much I can roughly tell without looking it up.
Re: I used AI-powered calorie counting apps, and they were even worse than expected
#14Gimmicky 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 tim…
This is different than the style of ai calorue app that extrapolates caloric content from pictures of your food. That kind is gimmicky BS
Re: I used AI-powered calorie counting apps, and they were even worse than expected
#15Gimmicky 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 tim…
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?
Re: I used AI-powered calorie counting apps, and they were even worse than expected
#16These 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.
What's going on with the google reviews of that app.. basically all 5 star with one word over and over again - 'good'
They're solicited, right?
Re: I used AI-powered calorie counting apps, and they were even worse than expected
#17Gimmicky 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 tim…
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.
Re: I used AI-powered calorie counting apps, and they were even worse than expected
#18Weird 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.
Re: I used AI-powered calorie counting apps, and they were even worse than expected
#19Funny, I was just discussing this on HN a few days ago:
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.
Re: I used AI-powered calorie counting apps, and they were even worse than expected
#20These 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.
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.