New calorie-counting app gives iPhone users another excuse to obsessively photograph their food

New calorie-counting app gives iPhone users another excuse to obsessively photograph their food

Counting calories can be a pain. For all the lazy dieters out there, salvation has arrived in the form of a new iPhone app by the workout and nutrition site DailyBurn. With Meal Snap, users start by taking photos of the food they’re eating (not a great stretch for snap-happy iPhone users who already take photos of their every meal), with an optional caption or description. The app will then calculate the nutritional breakdown of your meal, log it and track your caloric intake over time. Then you can overshare about it via Facebook, Twitter or Foursquare (hashtag #TMI is optional).

How do they do it? Magic, they say (recently snapped meals include a 261- to 392-calorie bowl of granola, a 96- to 144-calorie shrimp cocktail and a 69- to 104-calorie cappuccino). Our guess? Some sort of image recognition software paired with a database that picks up keywords in your optional description. Or, you know, a room full of magic calorie-counting monkeys.