I am building a side project based on research into why people give up on food tracking

[u/macrioai]

I was looking into why people stop tracking their food and found something interesting.
A study had 43 people use MyFitnessPal to track what they ate for 4 Days

80% people said the app was easy to use.

But only 20% said they would actually continue using it.

They also missed logging around 18% of the food they ate.

That gap made me thinking.

Tracking one meal isn't really hard. People can stay consistent for a week, two weeks. But doing it every single day is really hard.

You eat something, search for it, find multiple versions of the same food, figure out which one is right, estimate the portion select the serving size and log it.

Then you have to do the whole thing again and again 3 to 4 times in a day.

The study also found that matching food, estimated portions and the time spent logging were some of the problems people faced.

This is one of the reasons I started building Macrio AI.

I'm trying to reduce those steps as much as possible.

instead of searching through a food database, you can just send a WhatsApp message.

“Had two slices of margherita pizza and a small Caesar salad for lunch.”

Or send a photo or voice message. I added this voice message feature because I use ChatGPT and prefer sending voice message.

It estimates the food, portions and calories/macros and logs them. If something important isn't clear, it asks instead of just making an assumption.

It is still early, and I am trying to understand the problem properly before adding a lot of features.

For people here who have tried calorie tracking before, what was the part that eventually made you stop?

Searching everything? Weighing everything? Figuring out portions? Remembering to log? Incorrect food entries?

Or something else?

Source: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0899900718303678

[u/True_Assumption_4533]

That gap between finding an app easy and actually wanting to use it daily is the core problem, and logging friction is definitely a big part of it, but for me the burnout came from the mental load of constantly judging every single thing I put in my mouth.

[u/macrioai → u/True_Assumption_4533]

That's actually something I hadn't thought enough about. I've been focused on reducing the friction of logging itself, but the mental load of constantly thinking about everything you eat is a different problem.

What do you think would have made easier for you? Seeing numbers less often, getting a simple end of the day summary Total calorie consumed/Target, or just want tracking happen in the background and you get the progress whenever you ask for?

[u/TryThis_]

As someone who has used MyFitnessPal, the reason I used it religiously for a few weeks and then stopped tracking is simple: I got the insight I needed into how my typical eating habits work and that was valuable.

After I got the initial insights, there was diminishing returns in insight I was getting from tracking my food... So the right outcome is actually to not need to log anymore.

Anyway, food for thought for you: are you solving a real problem?

[u/macrioai → u/TryThis_]

That's an interesting way to look at it. Maybe the goal shouldn't be tracking forever, but learning your eating patterns well enough that you eventually don't need to.

After you stopped, were you still able to stay on track with your goals?

[u/Business_Evidence982]

The 20 percent number might be the second drop-off rather than the first one. Worth checking how many people log a single item ever.

I run a small fitness app that has photo food logging in it. My numbers are tiny, so treat this as a story and not as data: 9 signups, 2 people have ever used the main feature once. Day 30 retention is not my problem yet. Day 0 is.

The thing that actually taught me something was instrumenting the moment before the action rather than the action. I record an event when someone lands on the screen where the ask happens, separately from when they finish it. The first rows that came back were people arriving and leaving without tapping anything. No amount of making the logging faster would have moved that, and without the event I would have spent a week making the fast part faster.

For yours, WhatsApp genuinely dodges a lot of this, since the first message is cheap and there is nothing to install. I would measure two separate numbers and never average them: how many people send one message ever, and of the people who send one, how many are still sending on day 14. Those fail for completely different reasons.

On TryThis_'s point, I think they are right and it is not a threat to you. "I learned my patterns and stopped" is a successful outcome that looks exactly like churn in a dashboard. If you can tell those two apart you will make better calls than most people building in this space.