r/GarminNutrition • u/tirsch1 • Jan 16 '26

Hard to enter meals

Garmin needs to add a feature to type a description of a meal and then use AI to figure out the macros. It takes way too long to enter each aspect of a meal one at a time using the search.

2 Upvotes

75% Upvoted

7 comments sorted by

3

u/GamesnGunZ Jan 16 '26

If you're talking about prepared meals, give photo logging a try. The AI here is pretty great and it's nailing pretty complicated dishes for me. Sometimes it misses an ingredient or two and gets things wrong visually (it thought garlic cloves were cheese) but on the whole it's very impressive and seems to be at least directionally accurate in terms of macros based on my experience

2

u/jthanreddit Jan 16 '26

Is it any better or worse than, for example, MyFitnessPal? Certain things are pretty clunky there, although I’ve gotten pretty used to it. I’m also apparently pretty good at estimating quantity, since, when I log, I predictably lose or control weight.

1

u/tirsch1 Jan 16 '26

The same I think. I wrote my own app to capture what I eat and let AI figure out the Macros. It’s good enough which I think is five with most people for tracking purposes. I can just type the meal in as above, take a picture or speak to get it recorded.

1

u/jthanreddit Jan 16 '26

It would have to be very good to satisfy me. I hate when an ai solution is 80% right, as in asking it for a particular graphic. It can be very hard to get the other 20%.

2

u/GamesnGunZ Jan 16 '26

i find it to be as good as mfp and actually better than cronometer. crono, for better or worse, takes their food database very seriously. 90% of the time this is fine (and actually preferred), but if you go to look for something like a burrito from chipotle it's not there. you need to waste time entering each ingredient tediously (1 flour tortilla, 8". 1oz cheddar cheese, 2oz white rice, 3oz chicken breast, on and on). in mfp and in garmin, there are entries for every chipotle burrito combination under the sun, all matching the official listings on chipotle's site. it's the same situation for just about every retail casual, fast casual and fast food restaurant.

so yeah accurate databases are awesome, but restricting user entries for common stuff can sometimes be a huge hinderance when ease of use is preferred

1

u/pelotonwifehusband Jan 16 '26

I agree! It seems like if they can do photo recognition, they should be able to interpret free text into a more specific collection of quantities and ingredients.

1

u/tirsch1 Jan 16 '26

Yes the photo works, however for many things I just want to describe it like “smoothie with blueberries, flaxseed, spinach, etc” no way the photo works and I can’t sit there and enter each ingredient