Count calories by taking photos of your food

Counting calories can be a drag, but it’s often more frustrating to keep track of your calories than focus on consuming less.With apps like MyFitnessPal or other trackers that require you to manually type in what you’re consuming for the day (or scan via barcode), it can feel like a slog when all you want to do is move on with your day and stop making unhealthy food choices.That’s where a new app called Foodvisor comes in.

What is Foodvisor?

The French app, which is designed to make eating healthy a cinch, has an exciting premise: You simply snap a photo of your meal with your phone and instantly receive a breakdown of its calories, fat, carbs, sugar and other nutritional information. No muss, no fuss – that’s it!Foodvisor can identify what’s on your plate and keep you apprised of what it is you’re putting in your body in minutes, and you don’t even have to add separate entries for each food to track your macros!All you need to do is enter your vital statistics, like your weight, height, gender and age. When you photograph your lunch, dinner, or snack, it will survey the food it sees, and along with a nutrient breakdown, advise you of a target calorie count that you’ll want to hit if you’re planning on losing weight. It will also advise a target calorie goal that you can aspire to if you want to maintain your weight instead of losing.All the information Foodvisor is able to ascertain from your meals and the progress you’re making on your journey to becoming healthier will be saved from right within the app.However, it’s important to note that the app may not always be able to find something you’ve placed on your plate for the first time. Maybe it has no idea what that cool Japanese treat you’ve imported is.To add it to the app’s database, you can simply scan a product barcode to have Foodvisor pull its information, or manually add the information for yourself so that next time the app sees said item in a photo, it won’t need you to help it along.The app, which is completely free, is available for both iOS and Android users. If you’d like expanded functionality, you can opt to pay for the premium version. There’s a lot of convenience here with Foodvisor, but be advised of course that you may be better off if you consistently make complicated homemade dishes or eat “odd” foods – it may not be able to identify them all correctly or on a regular basis.But for the rest of us looking to maximize the way we track our calories and nutritional goals, Foodvisor is a massive step in the right direction.