Calorie Counter with ChatGPT

Counting calories has always been a pain. The apps are always cumbersome to keep track of everything you eat. Not only is it a bit of work to pull out the app and find the food you are looking for, but whenever you are eating a meal—unless you cooked it—it is a lot of guesswork to come up with the ingredients. I have literally brought a scale to restaurants to come up with a better count. When you do have a meal, you can search for it, but it becomes frustrating when you find one taco that has 20 calories and another taco that has 2,000 calories.

The apps tried to make it better by adding the scan feature, where you scan a barcode. This makes things a bit easier; however, not everything you eat has a barcode. In fact, you start gravitating towards packaged food instead of freshly made food, and that doesn't seem very healthy.

So, I have wanted to start tracking calories but have been dreading pulling back out the calorie counter apps. Then I thought, I wonder if they have included AI to make my life easier. My quick and brief research told me that some apps did use AI, but people were frustrated with the quality and ended up getting a calorie count from ChatGPT and logging the calories and macronutrients that ChatGPT gave. Then I had an idea.

I am already paying for ChatGPT, and if I was going to consult it anyway, why not use ChatGPT as my calorie counter! So, I created a new project called Food Journal, and told it my height, weight, activity level, age, and gender. From there, we discussed weight-loss goals and it gave me a target for how many calories I should be aiming for each day. I then told it that I was starting this food journal and that I wanted it to help me keep track of calories. We also talked about how I want to preserve as much muscle mass as possible, so we need to keep track of protein, and so we have a protein goal each day as well.

Now it is easy. When I eat, I can just open up the app and go to the project. I can either talk to it, type in what I am eating, or take a picture. It adds the meals and food and keeps a running total. If I have any questions, I can ask it about the food I am eating, what I have left in the day, or whether whatever meal or snack I am thinking about would be a good addition. This is also a nice way to not have to talk about what your diet is. Everyone has their phone out all the time, so I won’t look different. I don’t have to do tough mental calculations before I eat. And if someone wants to know why I am taking a picture of my food, I can say it is for my food blog :).

It is not perfect, but with some simple common sense and oversight I am able to correct for it. It is easier to log food this way, as it is more of a conversation, and it means that I don’t have to do the guesswork. While I know that it is not going to be as accurate as pulling out the scale and logging the food that way, I think it is going to be good enough to keep me accountable. I figure some days it is going to overestimate or underestimate, and that it will average out. After a couple of weeks, I will reassess based on my weight, and we can make some tweaks to the protocol, but for now I like that I am keeping myself accountable.