91–100 of 302 posts
Like, oil is insanely caloric and can accidentally add hundreds of calories, but it's nearly impossible to eat too many greens.
Once you learn this, then the tracking is just to keep you honest - your brain knows what to do but it lies to you when it wants to bend the rules and those little cheats add up enough to throw off the whole diet.
>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.
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?
> they need an app to track it? "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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
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.
If they aren't doing even that much, then they're not very interested in accuracy at all.
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.
A classic tale of a founder winning over engineering. "This stock model from huggingface is good enough, no need to train it."
The most important part of marketing and PR is lying to your customers.
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.
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 th…
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
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.
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.