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

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

#151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it ironic that my AI detector is ringing alarm bells at this comment (both its overall cadence, as well as it’s particularly unnecessary use of an em dash)?

Is the em-dash ever "necessary"? It was beloved by nerds on the internet long before there was any whisper of LLMs on the internet. What do you think chatbots are imitating if not humans who also use it?

I never saw a human use it in something different from literature. That's where I think the chatbots got it.

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

#152
It would be “eventually good” if, and only if, Vision problems were solved at 100% F1-Score. Which is absolutely not! So, to me, I expected bad and I received… bad results.

Paying for this crap is just throwing money out the window. Those startups should solve problems and them let people pay for it, for 99% accuracy, not at minimum of 66%.

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

#153

I use ChatGPT (4o model) to track my daily macros, specifically calories, protein, fat, and carbs. I have a prompt containing my macro targets and a list of the foods I typically eat or have at home. Throughout the day, I report my meals, for example five large eggs, two slices of sprouted wheat toast, and a cup of spinach with a pat of butter. It calculates the macros for each meal and keeps a running macros total s…

Is it ironic that my AI detector is ringing alarm bells at this comment (both its overall cadence, as well as it’s particularly unnecessary use of an em dash)?

Some non-English speakers sometimes throw whatever they wrote in English into a chatbot to correct the text, just in case.

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

#154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's that extra 20%. Everybody right now can do the hardware store and rewire their house for cheaper than an electrician, yet they'll still hire one to do it. That or maybe everyone will just except things being slightly more convenient but worse.

> That or maybe everyone will just except things being slightly more convenient but worse. This is how it will play out. You'll see it in the cost centers. You'll see it in the "I have an idea for an app" pitches. Business people will make these decisions, and consumers will too. { High convenience, High quality, Low cost } - pick two. Software engineering won't evaporate, but there's something new competing with it.

Yeah. I think the analogy with electrical wiring is quite illuminating. Few software errors have a similar risk profile as faulty wiring. Maybe if a calendar or messenger or such is buggy, that's enough of a nuisance to switch, but I doubt a lot of software is this critical. People already put up with plenty of bugs e.g. in games or social networks. Even with paid software, I'm sometimes surprised how much patience customers have developed when it comes to glaring deficits.

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

#155

I use ChatGPT (4o model) to track my daily macros, specifically calories, protein, fat, and carbs. I have a prompt containing my macro targets and a list of the foods I typically eat or have at home. Throughout the day, I report my meals, for example five large eggs, two slices of sprouted wheat toast, and a cup of spinach with a pat of butter. It calculates the macros for each meal and keeps a running macros total s…

With stuff like this, I am always curious: ok, you send it a picture of a plate, how does it know the food was cooked in butter instead olive oil? Or either way, with 2 tbsp of fat instead of 1?

Oh no, it is TERRIBLY wrong

Using VTT is better but still not perfet

The only certain way to do it is measure everything with a scale

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

#156
I wonder what are the errors bars for calorie counting, even assuming one measures food intake by weight accurately. Are the reference values in food package labelling any good, or is the variability from one batch to another and variability in absorption from one person to another so large that such calculations become an exercise of garbage-in, garbage-out?

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

#157
post #80

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'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 focu…

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

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

#158
post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think when people are mentioning alcohol they typically mean beer or wine - a can of beer is ~150 calories, so have a few of those a night, which isn't at all uncommon in some households, and over a week you're up ~1 lbs.

Also, 150 calories is somewhere between cheap American beer and a nice IPA or stout. You can easily hit 200-300 calories per beer.

New Belgium "Juice Force IPA", I'm looking at you!

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

#159
post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great achievement well done! Out of curiosity, did you track macros too and what calorie deficit did you aim for, and how long did it take?

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?

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

#160

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 gene…

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 " " or " ". 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.

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