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How are you counting calories from a 1-line description of your meal? Surely that’s not even close to accurate.
by what 2mo ago
How are you counting calories from a 1-line description of your meal? Surely that’s not even close to accurate.
- faangguyindia 2mo agoperhaps using ai.
- whateveracct 2mo agouh oh
- keiferski 2mo agoIf it includes all ingredients, cooking method, and weight in exact grams, it’s probably reasonably accurate.
- tptacek 2mo agoFor basically anything but chicken I give exact gram weights of proteins and of any fats or carbs. I generally don't give it any precision about vegetables that won't drive protein, fat, or carbs. Most meal components aren't going to meaningfully change the macro breakdown except for fiber, which I don't care enough about to track.
- cure_42 2mo agoYou should care more about fiber than any of the others if health is your goal.
- tptacek 2mo agoI'll make sure and let my GP know he was wrong.
- kingkongjaffa 2mo agoSnark aside, your GP took one module on nutrition in medical school, years ago. Doctors are not experts in nutrition. Most modern western diets lack fibre the most so eating more fibre is a sensible recommendation for basically everyone.
- tptacek 2mo ago[flagged]
- ofjcihen 2mo agoPeople are trying to tell you something that can literally save your life. Colon cancer rates are increasing at a breakneck pace. Chill with the snark for a second and realize you may not be the smartest person in every room.
- tptacek 2mo agoThis is going to be a funny thread to show my doctor. I think something that isn't getting through to people is: I'm not taking The Internet's advice on this stuff; I hired a person to handle these questions for me. Highly recommended!
- ofjcihen 2mo agoI quite literally, right at this moment, am sitting next to a friend who is a doctor with a focus on nutrition and they are saying that whoever told you that fiber doesn’t matter is going against almost all of the modern understanding of health science and research. His advice is literally “He needs to just Google it.”
- IanCal 2mo agoThey didn’t say fibre didnt matter. They disagreed they should care more about fibre than any other.
- tptacek 2mo agoA typical (in fact, the modal) line from the database, which goes back to April, is "oyakadon 1/2c rice, 2 thighs, 1/2 breast, 2 eggs, bunch broccolini, std oyakadon broth", and the model works out for itself that these are average-sized thighs and breast (boneless and skinless, because it's oyakadon). "std oyakadon broth" is a reference to a "house recipe", of which there's a side database, each costed by GPT5. There's a low/med/high adjuster on every entry; sometimes the thighs are bigger or smaller, for instance. I've: * Checked these against all three major frontier models and gotten the same macros breakdown within relatively tight bands * Manually researched a couple of the most common recipes * Run this system over many months against my most likely TDEE and reconciled against scale weight loss (which has been profound). My confidence in frontier model's ability to generate "good enough, probably more than good enough" from this level of meal description is quite high. Key simplifying assumption (for the model): I'm cooking most of my meals. I cook. I virtually never order out or eat packaged food of any sort. This would be a harder problem and the answers less reliable if I was giving it, like, "1/2 JP Graziano muffaletta, extra hot giardiniera".
- Ldorigo 2mo agoYou can actually get just as good results for packaged food if you just allow the agent to use a web search tool & keep a growing local database of "known food items". I did the same for a while, but it was quite expensive (this was a while back with less powerful models and required a bit of orchestration to make it reliable)
- tptacek 2mo agoPresumably it would Just Work if I wrote "1/2 bag cool ranch doritos", which is one of the virtues of this input/processing system.