[surfmike]

The founder of parrotpal (another AI calorie tracking app, supporting both text and photos) points out that using photos is one of the least accurate ways for tracking food: https://www.instagram.com/parrot.pal/reel/DAB9NtfM250/

Users also seem to like using photos less than text for food tracking: https://www.instagram.com/p/DBoSeQzM3bQ/

The author of this article seems to be against the concept of calorie counting as a whole too, but calorie counting does work well for many people. They also bring up intuitive eating as an alternative, but intuitive eating is not intended for weight loss while that's what calorie tracking is usually used for (though it can also be used for maintenance and for weight gain).

Personally, after using MyFitnessPal for a couple years, switching to ParrotPal made calorie counting way less time-I just need to give it a quick text (or voice) description and it does a surprisingly good job of estimating. There are a few times when I need to adjust it, I mostly try to overestimate. It's not perfectly accurate but it gives me enough accuracy to have successfully lost and kept my weight off.

[tayo42]

> seems to be against the concept of calorie counting as a whole too

What are peoples criticisms of calorie counting? Its the only thing that keeps my weight from creeping up. There are way to many calorie dense foods that can easily sneak in if im thoughtless. (I want my 20 year old life style back :( )

[schmichael]

My unprofessional nutritional advice is: do what works for you! So if that’s calorie counting: great! No need to give it a second thought.

But if you are interested in critiques, a fair summary might be: calorie counting is at best extremely imprecise, both on how we measure the calories in food and how we estimate energy expenditure by activities. A little googling should lead to numerous discussions. I really enjoy the podcast maintenance phase, and even if you don’t want to listen to the episode they helpfully include tons of links: https://maintenancephase.buzzsprout.com/1411126/episodes/106...

[shlant]

most people do not arrive at the idea that CICO (Calories In Calories Out) is useless or incorrect on their own - they usually buy into that belief because they follow specific diet communities or health influencers that are incentivized to tell them that.

[darkwater]

> What are peoples criticisms of calorie counting?

Probably the same criticism that applies to all "methods to do a thing". That people often miss the forest for the trees and obsess on the wrong metric (counting calories while still ingesting preprocessed industrial food and beverages) instead of the right one (losing weight while being healthy at the same time).

[rsynnott]

Sometimes people get a bit obsessive with it, would be the main obvious problem.

[edanm]

> Personally, after using MyFitnessPal for a couple years, switching to ParrotPal made calorie counting way less time-I just need to give it a quick text (or voice) description and it does a surprisingly good job of estimating.

I haven't used ParrtPal, what makes it easier than using MyFitnessPal?

[surfmike]

- More freeform -- just type what you ate (and add as much detail as you want) and it will log it, nothing more to select or search from after - You can log several dishes or meals in the same sentence - You can use voice

With MFP, there was always searching, then selecting the best entry, then fiddling with portion size. It usually ends up taking many times longer for me.