I’ve tried most of the popular calorie tracking apps. MyFitnessPal, Lose It, Cronometer. They all want the same thing from you: log every ingredient, scan every barcode, weigh your chicken breast on a kitchen scale. Three times a day, every day, forever.
Nobody keeps that up. I lasted about three weeks.
The thing is, tracking what you eat genuinely does help. A Kaiser Permanente study of nearly 1,700 people found that keeping a daily food record, in any format, doubled weight loss compared to not tracking at all. Writing on a napkin counted. The format didn’t matter. Paying attention did.
So how do you pay attention without an app making you miserable?
Use your hands
Precision Nutrition came up with this and I think it’s genuinely clever. Your hand is proportional to your body size, so a bigger person naturally gets bigger portions. No maths needed.
- Your palm (no fingers) = a serving of protein. Roughly 130–145 calories.
- Your fist = a serving of vegetables. About 25 calories. Go wild.
- Carbs are your cupped hand. A cupped hand of rice or pasta is about 110–120 calories, which is probably less than you think.
- Fats are your thumb. A thumb of peanut butter or olive oil is 90–100 calories. This is the one that sneaks up on you.
(Calorie estimates via Precision Nutrition)
One of each per meal, four meals a day, puts women around 1,400–1,600 calories. Double each for men and you’re at 2,400–2,800. Adjust from there.
I like this one for eating out or at a friend’s house. Anywhere you can’t exactly whip out a food scale.
Use your plate
The USDA and the American Diabetes Association both back this. Half your plate is non-starchy vegetables. A quarter is protein. A quarter is carbs. Use a normal 9-inch plate, not the giant ones restaurants give you. A plate built like that tends to land between 400 and 600 calories without you thinking about numbers at all.
Eat the same breakfast and lunch
Boring? Yes. But hear me out.
If you eat roughly the same breakfast and lunch each day, you figure out those calories once and never think about them again. All your energy goes toward dinner, which is the meal you actually want to get creative with.
What’s interesting is that a 2021 study of 637 women found that meal consistency predicted weight loss better than total calorie intake. Women who ate similar amounts at each meal lost more weight than those who ate erratically, even when the erratic eaters were eating less overall. Consistency seemed to matter more than restriction.
Part of it is decision fatigue. The more food decisions you make in a day, the worse those decisions get. Fewer choices about breakfast and lunch means you’re not burning willpower before noon.
I’ve eaten peanut butter on toast with a banana for breakfast nearly every morning for the past year, and oats with Greek yoghurt when I want to mix it up. Not because I’m disciplined (I’m really not) but because at 7 AM I don’t want to make decisions. I just want to eat and get on with my day.
Photograph your meals
You don’t have to do anything with the photos. Just take them.
Something happens when you point your camera at a plate before eating. You actually look at it. You notice the portion size. You register what’s there. A study in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition found that people who photographed meals had much better dietary recall than those who relied on memory, and research in Frontiers in Psychology found it works as a kind of automatic accountability.
Try it for a week. Scroll back through your camera roll on Sunday. You’ll spot patterns you weren’t aware of. The afternoon biscuits. The portions that have gradually gotten bigger. You don’t need calorie numbers to see what’s going on.
Learn your top 20 foods
You probably eat the same 20 or so foods most weeks. Spend one afternoon looking up the rough calorie counts for those specific foods, and from then on you can do a decent mental tally without opening anything.
Harvard Health makes a good distinction between calorie counting and calorie awareness. You don’t need to know your lunch was 487 calories. You need to know a chicken wrap is around 500, a banana is about 100, and a tablespoon of olive oil is 120. Round everything to the nearest 50.
Once those numbers are in your head, they stick. The blind spot is always cooking fats and sauces. That oil you cook with, the butter on the pan, the dressing on the salad. Those invisible calories are where all estimation methods fall apart, not just mental maths.
Ask ChatGPT
This has gotten popular recently, and it works better than you’d expect.
Describe what you ate (“palm-sized piece of salmon, cup of rice, some roasted broccoli”) and ChatGPT gives you a reasonable calorie estimate. With the paid version you can send a photo. A 2025 study in Nutrients found it identifies foods correctly 93% of the time. Calorie estimates average about 27% off, which sounds bad until you learn that dietitians looking at the same photos weren’t much better.
The catch is everything around the estimation. ChatGPT doesn’t remember what you ate yesterday. It doesn’t keep a running total unless you stay in one conversation and keep prompting it. No reminders, no daily summary. Photo analysis needs the paid tier at $20/month. And it consistently underestimates bigger meals, which is exactly when you’d want it to be accurate.
If you like this idea but want something that actually remembers your meals and tracks your day, that’s why we built Nemo. It lives in WhatsApp, so there’s nothing to download or sign up for. Just text Nemo a photo or description of what you ate and Nemo gives you the breakdown, keeps a running total for the day, and remembers everything. It’s like the ChatGPT approach but simpler and more accurate, since Nemo is backed by a verified food nutrition database rather than guessing from training data.
Pick whatever you’ll actually stick with
None of these are perfectly accurate. They don’t need to be.
A long-term study found that people who tracked food at least five days a week lost about 10 pounds and kept it off. Inconsistent trackers saw no net change.
The method you pick doesn’t really matter. Sticking with it does.
