No matter what diet you might be on tracking your food consumption is kind of key. Unless, of course, you’ve got the metabolism of a 19 year old! One of the biggest headaches with tracking food, for me at least, is that it’s hard work. No matter which app or service you use it’s hard to track with any degree of accuracy when you eat out or with a lot of home cooked meals. So, paradoxically, it’s easier to track lower quality prepared food that you might get from a supermarket! Mad really!
Enter Hava.
It’s not perfect, but what it does do very very well is handle food logging.
How? What makes it different?
They’ve leveraged some quite clever tech so that instead of having to search for a food that might be a close match to what’s on your plate, you simply snap a photo and it does the rest.
So for example this afternoon I stopped off for some overpriced Asian food in Amsterdam airport. I snapped photos of my plates:
And it worked out what was on the plates:
It’s often slightly off and I’ve found that some foods can confuse it a little. You also need to keep an eye on quantities, as it can often decide that you’re having a LOT more of something than you would be.
Unlike with the majority of other dieting apps it isn’t solely focussed on calories or carbs. Instead it looks at “satiety” ie. how nutritious and filling the food is. Sure, it does “care” about some things, but it’s not going to whine at you if you go over your carbs or your calories by a few points. What it does do, however, is “advise” on how you could improve your eating habits. So you learn fairly quickly that you need plenty of protein and that fresh leafy vegetables are generally a “good thing”.
Personally I like the food tracking and the tips. I don’t like that it’s pretty much isolated from everything else, so it doesn’t pick up on any data from smart watches or other devices or tie in with ANY of the other apps you might be using to track your weight loss and health.
It’d also be great if you could scan barcodes. Right now you can search for food and drink but the search function is pretty awful and I’ve no idea what database it’s using, because it’s very hit or miss.
For now, however, I’ll stick to Hava simply because the photo function works so well. Other apps claim to offer similar features, but they’re rubbish by comparison (I’m looking at you MyFitnesspal!).
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