[quickthrower2]

Thanks and congratulations on the launch. I am giving this app a try. The onboarding is smooth. I don’t think it asked for sex and height but I corrected those in the settings. 1649kcal a day to maintain weight for an average height and weight man seems a bit low though? How is it calculated?

[sw104]

That sounds like the Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) as opposed to the TDEE (Total Daily Energy Expenditure).

Some people use BMR as a target for losing weight, but BMR is sort of like how much energy you'd burn being in a coma. TDEE (1.2 x BMR, ish) would include daily activities like walking around, so is generally more appropriate.

[mactunes]

Apologies for the late reply. Somehow I didn't catch what was going on here :|

Your are indeed correct, it is indeed an BMR calculation, specifically I use a revised Harris-Benedict equation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harris–Benedict_equation#Calcu...

Perhaps though I should by default use a TDEE calculation...

[sw104]

It depends what the purpose is. I've been on a calorie-in-calorie-out weight loss journey since last August and for most of that time used BMR, as it subtracted a few hundred extra calories each day as a bonus.

For weight loss, eating at BMR is about right generally. And I'd imagine most use cases for calorie tracking apps are about weight loss.

To make it most accurate, I'd personally just add a basic multiplier for what sort of lifestyle people have (sedentary, small exercise like walking the dog, moderate exercise and hard exercise in the multipliers of 1.2x, 1.4x, 1.6x, 1.8x).

I exercise a lot and that typically adds 1000-1500 calories onto my daily BMR of 1500 or so, so the multipliers a lot of BMR / TDEE calculator websites use seem to make sense.

I'm more curious where the food database is sourced from. I tried something similar by getting data from British supermarkets (Sainsbury's, Tescos etc.) and none of them seemed to have APIs, so web scraping was the only possibility.

[mactunes]

Makes sense, happy to report that this will make it into the next version amongst some other things that didn't make it into the MVP. Thanks a lot for your feedback!

As for the food db: I use Open Food Facts which is great, but can be messy and sometimes wrong as it's mostly crowdsourced. I combine that data with data from US Food Data Central, which is an awesome resource.

You will see open food facts data as unverified in the app whilst food data central will appear as verified. Hope that makes sense.

I am in the process of adding major US restaurant chains as I recently found another great dataset with more than 30000 entries. So McDonalds, Starbucks, Dunkin Donuts, etc also coming.

[mactunes]

Hi quickthrower2, thanks for the feedback. Glad you like it and apologies for the late reply. I somehow totally missed that there were comments in this thread. I got a lot of feedback on producthunt and apparently that was enough to distract me.

It should have definitely asked for height and sex, I just tried it and it "works on my iPhone". Perhaps you had to scroll down and that wasn't obvious? Good feedback though, I'll see what I can do there!

As for the calculation: the child comment is right (see below), it's a BMR calculation. However, I think I should change it to a TDEE based as that takes daily movement into account. That should make it more realistic. Any thoughts?