I used AI-powered calorie counting apps, and they were even worse than expected

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.

I always just assumed these were terrible.

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 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.

>The app did recognize it as an apple this time, but estimated it at 80 calories when the actual count should have been closer to 120.

Where does the author take the 120 number from? The very link they gave says a large pink lady apple is 78 calories.