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- Hacker News
- I used to body build and I just don't understand how these AI calorie tracking tools are actually useful.
For example, 1 tablespoon of oil is 120 calories and 14g of fat. Miscalculating 2 tablespoons per day for a month is 3600 calories (or an 1.5 day's worth of food untracked). If you are trying to track what you eat, you end up cooking yourself and eating the same meals everyday so you aren't constantly re-measuring everything.
If your goal is to evaluate food for allergies, then tracking what you eat makes sense. But when it comes to macro tracking, how much is just as important as what.
by itake - I'll just never feel the same about "insights, advice and support" coming from a LLM vs. a real person. I know that perhaps in a blind A/B testing via text channels I probably won't be able to tell the difference, at least not right off the bat, but there's just something profoundly wrong with humanizing this. Personally I'd very much like an "AI training framework" (tried many but no fit yet), but I don't need a digital cheerleader.
RE: calorie counting, I used to work on a calorie counting app that worked on delivery meals (back in China - nobody cooks there). It was way back then, so we talked to the chefs and had recipes w/USDA-like DBs to estimate calories. The assumption was that you measure your intake from the app and your weight, if it doesn't go up/down as expected, you just adjust a coefficient every N period, i.e. not losing weight? ok let's set all calorie estimates at 1.1x for you. Rinse and repeat until you're losing weight.
by mstaoru