I used to body build and I just don't understand how these AI calorie tracking tools are actually useful.
For example, 1 tablespoon of oil is 120 calories and 14g of fat. Miscalculating 2 tablespoons per day for a month is 3600 calories (or an 1.5 day's worth of food untracked). If you are trying to track what you eat, you end up cooking yourself and eating the same meals everyday so you aren't constantly re-measuring everything.
If your goal is to evaluate food for allergies, then tracking what you eat makes sense. But when it comes to macro tracking, how much is just as important as what.
I can see 2 ways where metrIQ can help
1) First of all, you sound like a knowledgable person. In your case, you already know what to eat. So for the tracking part, Sophia will offer you convenience mostly. But she can also detect patterns and provide insights. Things like "I notice that during the evenings you tend to overeat. How about you try XYZ to improve that". Or you could ask directly questions about your journey or even projections ("When do you think I will have reached 67kg based on my weight trend").
In general though, you are right: for someone knowledgable and disciplined enough to track meticulously and eat standard meals, a calorie tracker is less useful. The discussion and statistics part remains relevant though
2) For people we are not so advanced though, it helps both by helping them understand things better, but also flagging things: lets assume an inexperienced user underestimates what they are logging. After some time, Sophia will pick up that the trend is not moving towards the right direction and will make suggestions based on what has been logged: is the user not logging everything? is the user hitting their targets in the app and still gaining weight? are his logs wrong, is his estimated activity levels wrong etc
>For example, 1 tablespoon of oil is 120 calories and 14g of fat.
You should not use them, but for some foods they may work. So if you have a person who isn't going to track the traditional way, then tracking something is better than tracking nothing.
Let's say you are consistently undercounting calories. In that case, free app like MacroCodex (which uses adaptive TDEE tracking) can offset that error and estimate your maintenance calories helping you make better adjustments going forward.
Deficit = TDEE - Intake
macrocodex will simply lower your tdee estimate if you are undercounting, then you'll cut calories further and you'll end up in deficit and lose weight.
Compensation works only when the error is consistent.
It does not solve macro tracking. This doesn't know if the overage is from fat, carbs or protein.
Adjustments are very delayed and noisy. Your body weight fluctuates with water retention, based on plethora of variables like stress, sleep quality, hormone cycles, etc. The feedback loop tracking weightloss with inaccurate calorie and macro tracking delay or fully impede goals.
>Compensation works only when the error is consistent.
many people have predictable eating pattern.
>It does not solve macro tracking. This doesn't know if the overage is from fat, carbs or protein.
For purpose of weight gain or loss it doesn't matter.
Deficit = TDEE - Intake
>Adjustments are very delayed and noisy. Your body weight fluctuates with water retention, based on plethora of variables like stress, sleep quality, hormone cycles, etc. The feedback loop tracking weightloss with inaccurate calorie and macro tracking delay or fully impede goals.
well macrocodex uses an algorithm which is designed to deal with all these issues and produce accurate maintenance calorie estimate from calorie intake and weight log data, you can find more details here: https://macrocodex.app/knowledge/rethink/adaptive-tdee/
Later i plan to add more details about the algorithm in a dedicated page.