Does Anyone Truly Count Calories?
A potential unicorn startup idea
Every diet discourse starts with one simple model: Calories In, Calories Out. We ought, in principle, be able to measure how many calories we consume, measure how much energy we use throughout the day, and observe the differance as weight gained or lost.
The second step of the discourse is to show that this model does remarkably poorly at measuring actual human weight loss/gain. This will then spiral into spirited discussions of whether humans (and more specifically, lazy fat Americans) are simply lack the willpower to follow a diet, or whether there’s some more complicated feedback mechanism going on where eating less causes our bodies to also burn fewer calories.
I’m not going to get into any of that here, I’ll just point to the classic blog post on the subject. What I’ll talk about instead is… how are people actually doing the calorie measurements?
When I tried counting calories, I found it to be a gigantic pain in the ass. For every single thing I consumed, I had to enter it into an app or spreadsheet, and look up or estimate its calories. It worked well enough when eating packaged convenience foods such as frozen dinners, which have the calories printed right on the label. Unfortunately, those are also the sort of ultra-processed foods that every diet plan ever says not to eat1. Instead, they urge, you should eat whole foods, cooked with love from natural ingredients in the old fashioned way, which means measurements like “generous spoonfuls,” “pinches and dashes,” or “dollops.” I found it very hard to accurately measure the calories in anything I cooked myself,2 and completely impossible when eating food that someone else had cooked, especially in restaurants where the “secret recipe” for making things taste better is often just putting in a whole lot of butter.
I suppose the real way to test this would be to prepare two identical versions of each meal, and then burn one in a bomb calorimeter. This seems like an excellent setup for a scientific study, but significantly more work than I’m prepared to do for everyday life. But maybe some rich guy with a private chef could do this?
Of course, to really make things scientific, you’d also have to seal yourself in some sort of calorimeter and measure every joule of heat that your body produces, continuously and forever. I suspect that even the most motivated of dieters would balk at this, and at some point it also makes it hard to do normal exercise.
But that’s fine, we don’t need these crude 19th century laboratory instruments anymore—we have phones! A range of apps with names like SnapCalorie, Cal AI, CalCam, CalBye, and MacroSnap all promise the same dream: to point your phone camera at your plate of food, snap a pic, and have it instantly reveal the nutritional content.
The Tech We Need
The only problem with these apps is that none of them really work, at least not as well as advertised. While image recognition has indeed improved rapidly since the days when Silicon Valley made categorizing food seem like a futuristic dream in 2017, it has not quite yet reached the stage here it can distinguish, for example:
Whole milk from skim
Diet soda from regular
Food cooked in tons of butter vs small amounts of margarine
In fact, I don’t think anyone can distinguish these things by pure sight. There’s a reason that chefs in professional restaurants have strict rules about what goes where, plus constant taste tests, and they still get things wrong sometimes. You have to taste the food to know what’s in it, a capability sadly lacking in modern smartphones.
What we need is a smart device that actually can taste food and tell you what’s in it. I’m not even joking about this. It doesn’t have to be creepy dentures, but maybe a pen-like object that you can stick inside of the food as a sensor. It would give an accurate, automatic count of the calories (and maybe other nutritional content) and be a massive boon to anyone trying to follow a diet (as well as other things like allergies and religious restrictions). It will make people skinny, healthy, and kosher all at once!
Someone should make that happen. Maybe me. Maybe you, the person reading this.
Unless you’re doing the Twinkie diet, which I have yet to try. It sounds miserable.
Of course if it was just for one meal I could do it, but sustaining this lifestyle for the long term seemed impossible.