Calorie Tracker: meals in a photo

You'd like to know how many calories are in lunch, but starting a spreadsheet and weighing every potato feels like too much. Calorie Tracker offers a shortcut: send the bot a photo of your plate or write what you ate. It estimates calories, protein, fat and carbs.

The bot is built for quick, simple tracking, with no complicated setup and no long questionnaires.

Two ways to log food

Pick whatever suits the moment:

• Photo. Snap the dish and send it to the chat.
• Description. Write in your own words what you ate and how much.

If a photo hides the ingredients, add a caption. Something like "pasta with chicken, about 300 grams" helps produce a more realistic figure.

Your day in a couple of commands

The bot shows more than one-off estimates. It has summaries, reachable through short commands:

• /today. Today's summary: total calories and macros so far.
• /meals. A list of your meals.
• /pricing. Packages of food estimates you can buy.
• /help. Help for the bot.

Summaries are available by day and by meal, so you can see which one pushes the numbers up.

Is it paid?

Estimates are sold in packages: the bot's command list includes a section for buying food estimation packages. Check prices and package sizes in the bot before paying, since they can change.

A tip: start with one or two test estimates on a dish whose calories you already know. That shows you how closely the bot matches reality.

Getting a figure closer to the truth

1. Shoot in good light and from above so the whole plate is visible.
2. Place an object for scale nearby, such as a fork.
3. Mention sauces, oil and drinks in the caption.
4. If you weighed the portion, write the weight.

Photo quality, lighting, angle and background all affect how accurate photo recognition is. Dishes with many ingredients get estimated worse than simple ones.

What it doesn't replace

You get an estimate, not a lab analysis. For weight loss or gain it works as a guide, but for therapeutic diets, diabetes and pregnancy, make decisions with a doctor or dietitian.

Habit matters more than precision: logging every meal gives you more than perfect numbers once a week. If counting makes you anxious or brings obsessive thoughts about food, put it aside and talk to a specialist.

How big is it

It's a small app, around two hundred monthly users. For questions, the project has a separate support contact listed in the bot's profile.

Try it on a couple of lunches and see if the format works. If you want huge food databases, friends and challenges, you may need something bigger. If you just want a quick ballpark figure, this is enough.