Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.
This is Optimizer, a weekly newsletter sent every Friday from Verge senior reviewer Victoria Song that dissects and discusses the latest phones, smartwatches, apps, and other gizmos that swear they’re going to change your life. Optimizer arrives in our subscribers’ inboxes at 10AM ET. Opt in for Optimizer here.
Once again, AI is failing to deliver on some of its promises.
Before my last long run, I made my customary preworkout breakfast. Two dark chocolate Kodiak protein waffles, a tablespoon of peanut butter, and a drizzle of honey. On the side, a modest cup of iced coffee with a splash of soy milk.
I write a newsletter called Optimizer. It’s a given that I’ve dabbled with counting macros — the practice of tracking how much protein, fat, and carbs you eat — to see if it helps my training. Of course, I spent five training blocks figuring out that this breakfast gives my body the roughly 355 calories, 16g of protein, 28g of carbs, and 17g of fat it needs to feel good during a morning run and not fall asleep at my desk after. The annoying thing is having to reenter the same information into any training or food logging app.
AI, I’m told, will change that. Recently, Ladder, my strength training app of choice, introduced AI-powered nutrition features that promised to make counting macros easy. All I had to do was take a picture, and AI would handle the rest. So imagine how it felt when the Ladder AI told me my carefully crafted breakfast was 780 calories, 20g of protein, 92g of carbs, and 39g of fat. How, when specifically editing it to include the exact brands and amounts, it resulted in another, equally wrong number.
This, my friends, is exactly why I don’t count calories or macros anymore.
Here’s an undeniable truth: food logging is the pits.
Traditionally, these logging apps let you search for food options ranging from frozen dinners to raw ingredients. Some even let you scan barcodes. That’s simple enough if all you eat is prepackaged or whole foods. Where it starts to break down is eating out at restaurants, or ironically, cooking at home. Restaurants that publish calorie counts often don’t provide macro breakdowns. And while you can import ingredients from online recipes, that’s little help to experienced home cooks improvising a weeknight dinner or substituting ingredients on the fly. To get the most “accurate” and efficient logs, you need to measure out every little thing you eat, avoid eating out, and basically eat the same things every day.
It gets old, fast.
... continue reading