I'm working on an app in this area [1], and I've spent a lot of time exploring how to responsibly use AI for food tracking.
My conclusion is that while AI is excellent for augmenting your tracking experience, it's not yet reliable enough to be the primary tracking method. Consistency is key to successful food tracking, and AI can certainly help users avoid the common issue of missing a meal and losing momentum. However, inaccuracies, like consistently being off by 100-200 calories per day, can significantly impact results, especially for those on lower-calorie diets (like 1,200-1,500 calories/day, which is common for many women due to their physical size).
With FitBee I landed on communicating to the user that these are estimates and you probably shouldn't use it as your primary method of tracking calories.
I'm working on an app in this area [1], and I've spent a lot of time exploring how to responsibly use AI for food tracking.
My conclusion is that while AI is excellent for augmenting your tracking experience, it's not yet reliable enough to be the sole tracking method. Consistency is key to successful food tracking, and AI can certainly help users avoid the common issue of missing a meal and losing momentum. However, inaccuracies, like consistently being off by 100-200 calories per day, can significantly impact results, especially for those on lower-calorie diets (like 1,200-1,500 calories/day, which is common for many women due to their physical size).
With FitBee I landed on communicating to the user that these are estimates and you probably shouldn't use it as your primary method of tracking calories.
I'm working on a calorie & macro tracker called FitBee. Tracking my food has been tremendously helpful in terms of improving my health, but it's always been kind of a PITA. These past couple of months have been really exciting as I'm leaning into using AI to make it less of a hassle to track & provide more insights.
I clicked because I have strong opinions about calorie-tracking apps (just since I've tried all of the major ones and know what features I like). I'm impressed! Love the UI.
I've tried a bunch, and while I'm reluctant to recommend a Quicken product, Quicken Simplifi is actually working out really well for my family and I. The UI is similar to Mint & it supports Apple Pay. I used to export all my data from Mint to a CSV for further cleanup/analysis, but the built-in tools in Simplifi are good enough now that I just do everything inside the app.
I was overweight in college and started my weight loss journey using an app called MyFitnessPal. Tracking calories not only helped me lose weight but also taught me a lot about nutrition and helped establish healthy eating habits that continue to benefit me. However, I’ve always been frustrated by the existing nutrition tracking apps. They are slow and bloated, lack accurate nutrition data, or don’t respect user privacy. I wanted to build something that I’d love using myself.
A few things that make FitBee stand out:
* Fast, lightweight and to the point - The app is just about tracking your nutrition and makes that front and center. I've tried to make things that you do often as simple as possible (e.g., log yesterday's breakfast).
* Robust Apple Health support - You can read/write data to Apple Health. I wear an Apple Watch so it's great for getting the energy burned through exercises.
* Accurate nutrition data - The nutrition data is sourced from the USDA dataset and nutrition labels off the packages. I also spent effort adding east asian foods (e.g. things you get at 99 Ranch or Weee) to the database, since those were hard to find/track in other apps I've tried.
* Photo Logging - You can take a photo of a food and get an estimate of the calories and macros. It's not 100% accurate but it's been super helpful for me when eating at a restaurant that doesn't have published nutrition info.
* Recipe importing - You can pretty much point any recipe at the app and it'll import the ingredients and generate nutrition information for you. As I got more into fitness, I started to cook more so this has been super helpful.
* No Ads - The app is monetized via a subscription.
* Monetization - Most of the features are free, but there are a few which require a monthly or annual subscription. I also recently added a one time purchase option since a few folks had asked about it.
Tracking my food has helped me get into much better shape but the leading apps in this space IMO are all quite clunky. I wanted to built something that was fast and lets you get on with your life.
A few stand out features:
- Nutrition label scanning if I don't have the food you're looking for
- Photo Logging for restaurant meals or complex meals you don't want to manually track
- It's light weight & fast
- Interactive widgets for things like water tracking.
Feels weird that you hype up its ad free in the description, when you need to pay to have the app work (monthly, annually, or permanent). I'd not expect a paid application to have ads.
I work on an iOS app (FitBee) built primarily in SwiftUI. Xcode routinely takes about 5-6 gigs of ram. If I enable predictive code completion that’s another 2gb. Very glad I upgraded to a Mac mini m4 pro with 48gb of ram.
Hey HN,
I've tracked my calories and macros off and on for years, and always felt that the existing solutions were bloated and clunky to use. Since food tracking is something you do multiple times a day, I sought out to build something that made tracking a bit less of a pain in the butt.
A few things that make FitBee stand out:
* Fast, lightweight and to the point - The app is just about tracking your nutrition and makes that front and center. I've tried to make things that you do often as simple as possible (e.g., log yesterday's breakfast).
* Photo Logging - You can take a photo of a food and get an estimate of the calories and macros. It's not 100% accurate but it's been super helpful for me when eating at a restaurant that doesn't have published nutrition info.
* Accurate nutrition data - The nutrition data is sourced from the USDA dataset and nutrition labels off the packages. I also spent effort adding east asian foods (e.g. things you get at 99 Ranch or Weee) to the database, since those were hard to find/track in other apps I've tried.
* Recipe importing - You can pretty much point any recipe at the app and it'll import the ingredients and generate nutrition information for you. As I got more into fitness, I started to cook more so this has been super helpful.
* Robust Apple Health support - You can sync data with Apple Health. I wear an Apple Watch so it's great for getting the energy burned through exercises.
* No Ads, Sign in with Apple - Uses Sign in with Apple to protect your privacy. No ads.
* Monthly Subscription - If you want to use some of the more advanced features, the app has a monthly and annual subscription.
+1 for GRDB. One of the best open source iOS SDKs I've used. The one downside I've run into vs. Core Data is that sharing a database between multiple processes (e.g., your main app and a widget) is not as well supported (to be fair, the quirks around this are documented extensively and quite well).
https://fitbee.app I'm continuing to build the nutrition tracker I've always wanted myself [1]
This month the focus is improving food data quality & search relevancy. I'm also starting to experiment with some more advanced generative AI use cases in the realm of providing suggestions on what to eat & analysis of your diet.
My conclusion is that while AI is excellent for augmenting your tracking experience, it's not yet reliable enough to be the primary tracking method. Consistency is key to successful food tracking, and AI can certainly help users avoid the common issue of missing a meal and losing momentum. However, inaccuracies, like consistently being off by 100-200 calories per day, can significantly impact results, especially for those on lower-calorie diets (like 1,200-1,500 calories/day, which is common for many women due to their physical size).
With FitBee I landed on communicating to the user that these are estimates and you probably shouldn't use it as your primary method of tracking calories.
[1] https://fitbee.app