I went snorkeling a few weeks ago, and it was an eye-opener to just how sedentary my lifestyle has gotten. I have been meaning to get back into shape after completely letting myself go in recent years, and what better way to do that than to start maintaining a food diary on my phone?
There are hundreds, if not thousands, of fitness and wellness apps on the Play Store, but I wanted to kick things off with something easy to use consistently. BitePal and SnapCalorie are two AI calorie-tracking apps that stood out because they both advertise the same thing: take a picture of your food, and the app will log all your calories and macros. Sounds easy enough!
As someone who has never followed a diet plan before, I needed an app that could do the thinking and planning for me, in addition to the tracking. I am the antonym of a gym rat; a home cat, if you will. I decided to spend three days logging everything I consumed as well as my activity data on both apps to help me decide which one would be better in the long run.
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Both apps offer the same features at their cores. You can choose the kind of lifestyle you lead, set a goal weight, choose your pace, and the app will use its nutritional database to spit out a diet plan for you to follow, giving you your target macros to hit daily.
You can connect your Google Health data to both apps, so it logs not only your food and water intake but also factors in your activities and workouts. You can also record your workouts and activity info manually if you want.
(Image credit: Reface Lithuania)
I like BitePal because it gamifies the entire food-tracking experience and takes the diet plan a step further, including step-by-step recipes that fit your daily goals. The app has a cute virtual pet raccoon that you can name yourself, and based on how well or poorly you’re meeting your fitness plan goals, the pet’s health fluctuates daily. The entire UI is colorful and fun, but the free plan limits the number of food picture scans, meal tracking, nutritional advice, and pet-related features.
SnapCalorie is a more traditional fitness app with a straightforward UI, which can be boring, but it offers free users unlimited access to food logging tools and features, including barcode scanning and recipe creation and logging. Its AI food photo capture requires you to describe the food in a few words, which helps the AI analyze it more accurately and yield better results. It takes some time to process, but I found it much more accurate than BitePal.
From homemade meals like goat meat biryani to foreign drinks such as Kinza Cola, SnapCalorie was shockingly able to recognize food items a lot better than BitePal. I had to just settle for the closest item BitePal could find, such as substituting the lesser known soda with Sprite. Clearly, the AI picture analyzing tool on SnapCalorie does more extensive research.
I know I can manually add the calories and nutritional values of the items unrecognized by BitePal, but that just defeats the purpose of using an AI food logging app. The entire reason why I want to rely on an app is so I don’t have to measure everything I put in my body and go looking for its nutritional info.
When I forgot to record an iced coffee I drank, I used a screenshot of the app I ordered it from and used that on both apps. SnapCalorie found the exact coffee from the specific cafe I ordered it from, pulled the calorie and nutritional info from the internet, and logged it in my food diary. It was amazingly easy!
BitePal couldn’t even clock that the iced coffee had milk in it, let alone find the exact drink. Instead, I resorted to manually typing out that additional info once the app created the wrong record based on the screenshot of the coffee. Even though you can edit the name of the food once the AI creates a record based on the image, BitePal lacks the smarts to identify the item properly.
The verdict is in…
After three days of extensive food logging on both apps, I have decided to stick with SnapCalorie for long-term use. The fact that it can recognize foods from different cultures and parts of the world is a vital feature. It also offers all of the most important features of the app with the free basic version.
I can see BitePal being a kid-friendly fitness app, though parents will have to be prepared to pay for it. It’s an exciting and interactive way to teach children about the importance of eating clean, consuming the right amount of fiber, calories, and fats in a day, and staying hydrated. Parents can even connect their child’s Google Health data from the Fitbit Ace LTE or whatever fitness watch their kids use. The pet raccoon is adorable, and the entire layout and UI are so well done. I just wish the AI food recognition was better, because that’s the main purpose of the app.
Interestingly enough, when I was first setting up BitePal and SnapCalorie, both gave me different timelines for me to achieve my goal weight even though I chose the exact same pace, with SnapCalorie giving an earlier date to achieve my target. Based on how much more extensive SnapCalorie’s food library and analysis seem to be, I’ll be trusting it to help me achieve my goal.