Android, iOS: There are lots of food and calorie tracking apps, but for any of them to work usually means you must make a significant commitment to using them daily. The simplicity of Calorific means that it has a great chance at becoming a permanent habit.After launching the app and choosing a meal you only have two clicks to make to log the food: one click to choose the food type (green=healthy, yellow=OK, red=bad) and another to choose the portion size (tiny, small, medium or large). The developer argues that simplicity trumps precision in developing food habits.
“The truth is, most people eat junk and know that it’s junk,” says WorkSmart Labs co-founder Aterm Petakov in an email. “What they need is a way to be held accountable for those choices and change them over time. It’s an idea that’s very counter to the Type A/engineer-driven calorie counting that’s on the market today. This makes it very polarising, but after people use it for some time, they love it.”
I have some small qualms with the two-click claim: Foods that incorporate both good and bad foods, such as a salad with a high fat ranch dressing, require you to log both a green portion and a red portion. Also, if you’re not sure what category or size a particular food falls into there is an included database, but this will of course take more than two clicks. Neither is a deal breaker.
Calorific is a free download in the Android Market and the iTunes App Store.
Calorific Diet Tracker [WorkSmartLabs via Mashable]
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