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

This is the classic refrain product owners counter back with any time people present reasonable criticism of their AI app.

User: "This (AI product) doesn't work!"

Product Owner: "Well, humans are also bad at that."

That's not the promise of these apps in general! The whole selling point of AI is that they're vastly better - if my eyeball estimate is "pretty inaccurate" and by your own admission the app is "pretty inaccurate" then why the hell would I use your app??

From the very top of the page you linked:

> SnapCalorie is the first app where you can take a picture of any meal and get an accurate calorie count and nutrition in seconds

(emphasis mine)

This is without a doubt the worst App I installed in the last years. It is predatory and has the worst user experience I have ever seen. I'm serious.

It begins with that i haven't even tried out anything, before logging in - that the google store popup comes up that I should rate the App - on the same screen you even tell users please rate us - HOW?? HOW should i rate something now that i havent even used yet.

Then, like in the 20th century i have to supply an e-mail/password and wait for a OTP instead of just using the Google EcoSystem and let me login with my existing Google Account.

After that, i went through at least 10 pages of bullshit were I have to give my information, weight/height/metabolic rate etc - even adjusting the calorie deficit didnt work outright if it is 0 and you want to put a minus before it it just goes away. You first have to enter a postive > 0 value to be able to ad a Minus.

Mind you, i just want to see what that App is about what can it do - i don't want to enter and click next next for a gazillion informations first after being annoyed by "please rate us".

Then, after completing the "setup" i get a fullscreen overlay to annoy me about PREMIUM membership - AGAIN I HAVE NOT USED ONE SINGLE FUNCTION OF YOUR APP YET.

But not enough, I want to try it out with a photo from my meal today and on the camera lense screen it annoys me again with PREMIUM!!! You can only do 3 Photos a day. Dude your app is so predatory its just trash.

Then i select the photo from the gallery and have to CROP it??? Its a fullscreen picture of just the meal - nothing else and you annoy me with cropping it?

Then, the actual function - while it recognized my meal it was off by the calorie count and weight by a factor of 2. The same picture, for free, google gemini flash recognized correctly too and gave an accurate display of average calories (it approx. 450g). I added the exact weight to gemini afterwards to have the correct estimation and it gave me the real value.

I tried to do the same in your app, instead of 300g i edited the entry and choose 600g. And clicked save. I was puzzled that nothing changed. Then i saw the portion size went from 1 to 0.5 - just by me changing from 300g to 600g. What a stupid user experience. So i had to change the weight AND return back the portion size to 1.

Again, everything your App does apart from massively annoying users, gemini and chatgpt can do better for free.

What about when people give up because you massively underestimate their calories? Or when people develop eating disorders because you massively overestimate their calories?

If the goal is to learn then accurate information is important, although I suppose it's harder to get a VC to fund.

How can your AI hope to be accurate. Visually, Can you tell how much butter or oil someone used in the recipe? Visually, Can you tell if it's 73/36 ground beef or 97/3? Can you tell if that taco meet is beef or turkey? Can you tell if that glass of milk is skim or actually just heavy cream?

You can't tell if I cooked my scrambled eggs in the rendered fat from the sausage I cooked just before it, or if I used a teaspoon of olive oil

There's too many sources of calories you just can't see at all. I made jambalaya last night. If I'd sauteed the veggies in a tablespoon of oil or a cup of oil you wouldn't be able to tell.

What do you mean by this?

> it's completely free to use SnapCalorie, the $79.99 price is a donation to support our research

I just downloaded the app and I don't see any way to use the premium plan without paying 79.99 or 6.67/month. How do I choose not to donate?

Or do you mean it's a required donation? And if that's true, in what sense is the article wrong, given that it says exactly that?

Thanks for mentioning voice, I prefer that to photos. Photos seems like the most complex technically.

AI seems to be going heavy into text/chat and images but voice is really the perfect UI to me. I would be totally fine if I could trigger a "call" from the app and talk to an AI on the phone for 30s and it could log my meal, give me some advice, etc.

Do you use the LiDAR Scanner on the iPhone for your predictions?

How do you deal with sauces / toppings that can be widely variable in macronutrients?

You develop a sixth sense for how calorific foods are when you track calories consistently. I kept a meticulous food journal for about six months before I realized I didn’t really need to anymore because I had gotten so good at just estimating my totals.

Protip: most people underestimate the calories in alcohol

I did Weight Watchers once when I was young. It didn't stick at the time, but it did give me a great deal of perspective that lead to healthy eating and exercise habits that did stick. I worked at Barnes & Noble then, and coming in and realizing that a grande frappuccino wasn't just 'unhealthy' it was all the points. I started reading labels.

Ultimately what worked is what you say, "educating...better decisions" Every diet I tried I concluded the secret sauce was just doing what I already knew - stop eating so much crap and move around more. It was hard yet liberating to get to a point where I wasn't on a diet I was just consciously choosing salads over fries, passing on desert, and not buying junk food so I just don't have it when the compulsion hits. (ADHD meds helped with compulsions, so it wasn't all iron will)

It was like getting sober in a way. I knew, but I also had to want to stop.

This was the huge benefit of weight watchers. I saw hundreds of people utterly shocked they could eat a literal mountain of salad for the same number of “points” (calories/50) as a tiny piece of something sweet or fatty.

They genuinely had no idea, and it changed their lives.

Yeah there's like 2 or 3 foods you realise you're eating that totally mess you up. For me it was peanut butter and sausages (not together...).

Just so many calories and it's not like I even cared about either that much.

100% agree it is about re-educating yourself about calories in food. I wasn't happy with my weight but it was never 'obese': I am 5' 8" and weighed 187 lbs.

Back in November I started tracking calories in the app Cronometer. I lost 35+ lbs down to 151 lbs as of this morning.

Even as a 'relatively healthy' dude, I realized just how bad my perception of calories and macros in food was. So, I totally agree with this.

Yes exactly, all that's needed in practice is to learn a handful of simple heuristics and you'll be fine if you follow them. Unfortunately simple does not equate to easy, losing weight is quite hard for most people but the hard part is not knowing what to do, it's actually doing it.

I think that nearly all of the consumer weight loss industry, of which these silly AI photo apps are a small part, is an attempt to turn a simple but hard process into one that's complicated but easy. In practice such shortcuts generally don't work which is why products like these have miserably low success rates.

In many respects calorie counting is an exercise in misinformation induced stupidity, from bad science.

What people fail to realize is the calories on the label aren't the calories they are actually getting. Those on the label are the calories for the substance found by burning it in a lab. Calories absorbed are quite different, and depend on the method of preparation and personal factors. Different methods release different percentage amounts to be taken up by your body in digestion.

Additionally, the standard saying "Calories in Calories Out" only applies when you are healthy, and have no weight or medical issues. The moment you have any kind of metabolism-mediated or norepinphrine-mediated reactions (i.e. allergies, chemical exposures [pfas], etc), that paradigm fails.

If you are getting ravenously hungry or nauseous , you are starving yourself, and this can damage your metabolism, and it won't result in long-term weight loss. You lose metabolically active tissue over fat which adapts to lower BMRs.

When you are eating healthy at the proper times, you aren't getting ravenously hungry.

Anyone who has done Atkin's knows that after they transition into ketosis, they don't get hungry. They eat very high caloric foods, but they eat much less, and the carbohydrates, or excessive protein, and usually so low that the extra fat they eat doesn't get stored as fat. Not everyone can do that though because of issues with kidney, liver, or gallbladder, but the ones that can lose amazing amounts of weight effortlessly. The diet itself is also anti-inflammatory, and cholesterol isn't an issue.

This is going to shock people.

I've weighed my food out to get that daily calorie count. Here's a mindblower. I can eat 2700 calories of fats, and protein in a 60 30 ratio keeping carbs at 20g for the day, and I will on average lose 1-2 pounds a day, and this is done after the transition where water weight drop off has already plateaued (the weight loss isn't water weight, and its mostly not muscle mass either).

Each pound is 3500 calories. My BMR is supposed to be 2200 for my weight and height/body composition. How am I in what amounts to an effective 9700 calorie deficit with no exercise, and no hunger?

I've done this alongside college friends too. They see almost the exact same results. They found it a little annoying because they had to get checked out by a doctor first for those issues, and had to drink a lot more water, eat more fiber, and ensure they got the essential vitamins. Aside from that, the fat just falls off.

Calories in vs. Calories out is a lie.

Those are easy manual adjustments to make. Far easier than estimating an entire meal

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.

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.

Yep. Iirc any kind of diet works as long as it is restrictive. Even if the restriction is “do not eat anything that has blue on the package”.

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.

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.

Attention and focus make it work. You must be ‘in it’ - otherwise it wont work.

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.

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.

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.

Maybe this one: https://today.duke.edu/2019/02/tracking-food-leads-losing-po...

I bet @onionweigher could - if all you ate were onions

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.

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.

I have faith that ML can approximate calories from images under the following conditions:

- 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.

> 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 :( )

> 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?

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

Cool, it can replace myfitnesspal features from 10 years ago, but do them worse.

Revolutionary.

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)?

Do you find this easier than scanning barcodes with traditional calorie tracking apps?

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?

Did you verify it sometimes how accurate it is? I would be wary of it to be honest.

I'm doing the exact same thing. I have built a small app for it too but I like using the plain ai too.

I really don't get the bearish on AI folks.

One company has a tool that can replace what we professionally do.

This app would have taken person months to build, yet here it is, almost as an afterthought.

The next ten years are going to be wild. Hope everyone has a plan for leveling up and riding this tsunami.

Even if LLMs presently can't do intricate things, that doesn't matter. I know in my gut that my generous total comp job isn't going to be available in the future in its current form. In aggregate, the work we do isn't going to be as hard or as in demand as LLMs devour more of the market share and growth of the human economic field and attention economy.

The LLMs are likely going to increase demand for software, but in doing so they'll eat more of the market share.

ZIRP, Section 174, industry-wide layoffs, offshoring, and now this. Plan accordingly. I'm sure there are gradients with tremendous success to be had, but for many there will be a decrease in fitness.

I noticed that too - I wonder if the coin/hand was cropped out?

This is my experience too. Not even 2 weeks, it was like a really tedious 3 or 4 days then I pretty much knew what to take out.

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?

They provide value in that they lie to you and you feel better about yourself.

I wouldn't trust the revenue numbers, plus the churn is probably insanely high. Flashes in the pan

> CalAI, for example, is making 35M+/yr.

Source?

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.

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.

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.

We might know the inner workings of the "machine" but we can control inputs (food) and measure outputs (weight).

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.

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.

"We measure food's calories by burning it" - are you sure that how it is done?

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)

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.

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.