Show HN: Workout.cool – Open-source fitness coaching platform

I count calories and use chatGPT to do so by taking pics of my meals / what I eat.

I'm looking forward to Meta adding this feature to their Ray Ban smartglasses so the glasses automagically count my calories each time it sees food on my plate or going into my mouth. A feature they possibly should make optional, but for me who has prescription Metas it would be a big time saver (try to eat 1500 to 2000 calories a day and burn 250 to 500 in exercise). I think the knowledge of how many calories you consume done automagically would prompt 1/4 of people thinking and or on Ozempic to not do it.

You know counting calories by taking a picture literally doesn't work right? In fact, I'd argue it's one of the best examples of when an LLM confidently feeds you misinformation. An obvious example, a chicken breast fried in oil and a chicken breast air fried look identical, yet the oil fried one would have 3-4x the calories at least. Don't take my work for it though - this was just on HN the other day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44220135

I agree in principle, but I'll say that the number of calories are likely not 3-4x. The 3-4x number is for deep frying chicken. You usually don't do that if you aren't also breading the chicken.

A pan-fried chicken with a little oil in the pan to avoid sticking/make better thermal contact will add calories but not 3-4x more. You're likely using about 1 tbsp of oil which is around 100 kcal. 100g of chicken has around 160 kcal. Even assuming all the oil ends up on the chicken (it isn't) that's ~2x the calories at most.

Perspective wise, though, it'll by the white rice or mashed potatos that are more problematic in terms of calories. Both have a load of calories and can't be eyeballed by camera. It's all about the weight for those. And if you threw in butter/oil, even harder to know what the actual calories are.