C. Scott Brown / Android Authority
I don’t count myself as a fitness-tracking nerd who needs a smartwatch strapped to his wrist every waking second just to log every muscle twitch. I wear mine only while working out, or occasionally when I’m away from my phone for a bit — like when it’s in another room — to avoid missing calls or notifications. That’s it. That’s the entire purpose of a smartwatch for me.
While my watch can track everything from my broken sleep to biking laps — you know, the calories I burn — without me lifting a finger, it can’t as seamlessly track the calories that go into me. I’ve always struggled with nutrition tracking. Even though dozens of apps let you log your daily meals, the friction remains.
The only wearable that could bridge this wide gap in fitness tracking, I foresee, is smart glasses. And even though I’m not too fond of making every wearable “smart,” if glasses could handle nutrition tracking for me, I’d happily throw my wallet at them.
If your smart glasses could track your food automatically, would you use it? 1 votes Absolutely 100 % Maybe 0 % Only if it's accurate 0 % Nope, too creepy 0 %
Manual logging is urghhhhhh
Kaitlyn Cimino / Android Authority
The last thing I want to do is pull out my phone to log my meal while I’m still chewing or right after I’m done eating. Because I know that if I don’t do it right, then, I’ll either forget to do it later or forget the specifics of what I ate. And any such gaps make the rest of the data meaningless — all that carefully logged information suddenly becomes unreliable. That, in turn, makes me slack off even more, and soon the whole tracking habit derails.
So, it’s either I track everything meticulously and religiously, or not at all. Anything in between is just meaningless, sporadic data with little to no use, except maybe for spotting my pattern of failure.
Apps have tried to make things easier with barcode scanning for snacks, saved meals, AI photo recognition, and so on. Sure, that helps a bit, especially the last one. But I still have to remember to log, pull out my phone at the dinner table, and risk being judged for snapping a picture of my food like I’m about to post it on Instagram.
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