| A calorie tracker app has been my tool of choice for the past few years, one that includes a catalog of food items, meals, and recipes. The two most useful features are the barcode scanner (scanning is much easier than typing into a search bar) and the fact that it knows, for example, how much a slice of cheese from a scanned package weighs. Weighing the food is actually the most annoying part, at least for me. It’s even trickier when you're having breakfast and need to weigh butter, etc., before and after to get the difference, to avoid prepping everything beforehand. All that sounds annoying, and it is. But compared to exercise, it has been a great time investment for me. Weighing things and using this app takes about 5 minutes a day. It yields results I'm happy with and significantly reduces uncertainty. When you're unsure if you can eat one more thing near the end of the day, you can just look it up. Otherwise, uncertainty, at least for me, leads to under-eating, causing more hunger the next day, or overeating, jeopardizing the goal. The thought of using an LLM to analyze a picture is intriguing. I tried laying out items from the fridge on a plate and asking an LLM what I could make from them. That worked surprisingly well. But I like your idea much better. The question is how accurate that would be. But snapping one more picture and testing it for a few weeks sounds fun. Thanks for the food for thought! :) |
You can then validate the data by tracking your lost calories (calculable from your lost weight - I do it each week) and compare with the predicted weight lost calculated from the vendor 's nutrition facts table.