Gimmicky my ass. I speak a sentence every night on a thread to ChatGPT about what I had for breakfast, lunch and dinner along with quantities and it spits out my macros and nutritional breakdowns effectively. It’s the easiest and most no nonsense way I have found to record this information. Since it’s all on the same thread it always outputs the data in the same format and I can ask it for information over custom time ranges on the fly. I’ve also uploaded the nutritional labels for all my protein shakes and supplements to the same thread so I can just say “I had my nighttime shake” and it knows what I am talking about immediately.
>I speak a sentence every night on a thread to ChatGPT about what I had for breakfast, lunch and dinner along with quantities and it spits out my macros and nutritional breakdowns effectively.
Not OP, but I have verified, and it is accurate. At least accurate enough from images or descriptions when assuming average proportions. Where it's really accurate is when you have measurements, even rough. I took to having a 1/2 cup scoop around the house so I could get volume measurements.
Initially I verified against labels by eating the serving size precisely. Then, I switched to weighing and doing the math on random days or meals.
For some items I would tell it the calories and macros and it would remember (a pb spoon is a common treat around my house).
It's good.
But like all food journalling the benefits are not so much having macro balances or tallies, its in making you aware and making you think about what you're eating. That alone takes you out of autopilot and lets you eat better.
It's just bad at math. So I would ask it to output a json struct for each day, that I could inspect by sight, then I'd save that and had a python script to actually tally.
I do this too and it's been spot on. I also have a very good idea of what I'm eating though: "2 oz of steel cut oats, 1 banana, probably about 4oz by weight, without the peal, about 12 ounces of coffee with 1 tsp of sugar and about 4oz of light no-sugar almond milk"
Tasks like summing a bunch of numbers from different parts of the input over a specific time period are still pretty error prone for LLMs. I would exercise caution if these results are important to you. A database or spreadsheet is going to be far more reliable – maybe you could have ChatGPT output a structured format and you could do the summation in a google sheet?
Read the article. What you are doing has nothing to do with the apps the article is talking about.
You are providing accurate info to an LLM and it is assisting you with information processing.
These apps are trying to just take a picture of arbitrary food and just trusting a neural network to be magical and tell you the macros in the food from a photo.
