i recently got a smart watch for unrelated reasons to my diet, but it came with a calorie tracking function. you tell the app what you ate, in plain terms ("half of a banana" / "one chicken breast") and it automatically figures out cals and macros for you. it also factors in your exercise for the day.
obviously it can't factor in everything. cooking different ways will yield different calorie counts. ive just always been too lazy to weigh everything to lose weight…
using the model in this app, i'm doing pretty good staying close to 1500. but i'm not sure if the app is under or over estimating or anything. anyone have any experience?
the watch i bought is the amazfit bip 6 and im using it with the zepp app.
by ashinary
2 Comments
No, because how do they know much of one chicken breast is? The only way to be accurate is by weighing food and even then, its still not 100% accurate but its as close to being one. Macrofactor is a pretty good
Aaaa the moment I saw the word “AI”, it was over.
Nutritional exactness is already a pretty variable task, and relying on an infamously-make-shit-up machine to estimate calories based on vague descriptions only muddies the waters more. It’s not gonna know the difference between a small or big chicken breast, or a raw or cooked one — for all it knows you could be eating the large ones from those hormone-addled mutant chickens, or smaller 150 gram sizes that sizzles out to 100 grams after baking.
It’s more effort but you have to get a food scale and do the measuring yourself where you can — it’s what most of the people on these kinds of subs are doing, and for me it pretty much illuminated how much I was actually eating before (ungodly amounts of rice, too much oil where a dry fry or a spray could have sufficed, etc). Also, don’t trust (or at least put too much stock into) the calories burned portion of any fitness device. There was a guy in an earlier post who absolutely insisted he was keeping 1500 yet only went with his gut / exercise habits on that and was no doubt putting away at least 2.5k cals of rice and curry every day — don’t be like that guy.