I Learned More Than I Thought I Could Using Diet Trackers
I do my own thing the best is to eat well and stay in shape. But as a mother of three, it is often difficult to remember what I ate today, or how much water I drank.
Thankfully, a new slide of food tracking apps—often powered by computer vision and artificial intelligence—has arrived to fill in the blanks in my memory, and motivate me toward a healthier lifestyle. I downloaded several food tracking apps, such as BitePal, Hoot, Lose It!, and MyFitnessPal, to better understand my daily intake and output. I also spoke with nutritionists to understand what information these apps can provide, and what their limitations are.
The biggest benefit of food tracking apps is that they help with awareness and accountability about what we eat, says Meridan Zerner, a registered dietitian in Dallas, Texas. “We’re busy people, right? Let me stop and think about this and be intentional about what I eat,” Zerner said. “Oh my god, I didn’t have enough fiber, or I didn’t have enough iron. Okay, let me do it differently tomorrow. Let me accept it because now I have a good answer.”
Zerner says these types of guidelines are great for raising awareness because people often underestimate their food intake by 20 to 50 percent.
Time to follow
To start, most apps have me enter the basics: my current weight and height, and my diet goals. Every app I tried promised to help me lose weight, maintain my weight, or gain weight, depending on what I was hoping to achieve.
Some of the applications require registration for basic features such as food logging, and fees were around $35 per year. Some apps let me do basic logging for free, but additional services like nutrient tracking or granular training advice require a subscription, at prices up to $80 a year.
Individual apps asked me to enter basic information about my body measurements. Others get more specific, asking about my habits, how active I am, what kind of diet I eat (vegan vs. meat eater), and the quality of my sleep. Once I put all this in, each app calculates the approximate calories I need each day.
Although I was happy to find that information, I was surprised by the range of calorie recommendations in all the apps based on my height and weight, which made it difficult to know how many calories I really needed each day.
“All these apps, when they’re making calorie recommendations and energy recommendations, they’re going to have to make those based on an equation,” Zerner said. The equations probably can’t account for things that vary between people like hormones, bone size, and genetics, she said.
“That’s one of the benefits of going into a registered, licensed dietitian,” he said. “We can actually do a resting rate test to find out, ‘Hey, this is exactly what your burn rate is.’ Sometimes it follows the predicted figure, and sometimes it doesn’t.”
As my day went on, I entered the types and amounts of food I ate at each drink or meal, and each app counted calories and told me how much protein versus fiber I ate, how many calories I ate each day, and how many calories I had left to meet my goal weight.
Several applications have integrated AI analysis with the phone’s camera, so that I can take a picture of my food, and it will estimate the number of calories in each dish. It sounds consistent, but there were significant differences from one application to another. For example, one app listed a Mediterranean dish at about 1,000 calories, while another was much higher, so I had to verify the ingredients and adjust the measurements myself.
