What does tracking calories actually consist of?
Two figures per food and one sum. A figure per 100 g, which comes from a label, a public food table or an estimate, and an amount, which comes from you. Multiply, add up the day, compare it to the target you set. That is the basic arithmetic every calorie tracker uses, and it has not changed since people did it on paper.
The amount and its state are often the largest uncertainties once a reference entry has been chosen. Rice recorded dry against a cooked reference can move the result far more than the final addition does.
The rest of this pillar is about that second figure: how to get it without a scale, what to say when a food changes weight in the pan, what the fat added, and what to do with a day you did not record at the time.
What actually moves a figure by more than a third?
Four things, and the order matters because it tells you what to weigh when you only weigh one item.
| What changes | By how much | What to say |
|---|---|---|
| Water absorbed in cooking | Dry pasta is about 371 kcal per 100 g, cooked about 158 | The weight and its state: "80 g of pasta, dry" |
| Water lost in cooking | Raw chicken breast about 120 kcal per 100 g, roasted about 165 | The same, and the likely reading is assumed where you leave it open |
| Fat added in the pan | About 88 kcal per 10 g of oil | The amount that went in and the share that was yours, as its own item |
| A variant within a family | Whole milk about 61 kcal per 100 g against about 35 for skimmed | Which one, when you know; a shrug is recorded as an estimate |
Bottom line: prioritise the foods whose quantity or cooking state changes the meal most; record the rest with an honest portion estimate.
A portion cue is not a measurement and the record should not pretend otherwise. A cup, a spoon or a size word converts to grams and is stored as an estimate that says so, which is the honest version of tracking without a scale.
What does a tracked day tell you at the end of it?
What you ate, and its distance to a number you chose. Not what your body used: that side is estimated by an equation and an activity factor, never recorded, so a deficit is a gap between a guess and a record rather than a measurement.
A day shows what was recorded in detail; a week can show the pattern across recorded days. A period read gives the average across the days that have entries and says how many there were, which is the honest way to report a week with a gap in it.
And a count is one instrument. It cannot say whether the number you chose suits you, and nothing in it replaces a professional where a professional is the right answer.
How does IZeat change the work of tracking?
IZeat is the calorie tracker inside ChatGPT, Claude or any other assistant. Tell the assistant you already use what you ate instead of searching for foods and entering them one by one. The arithmetic above is unchanged; what changes is that describing the meal is the entry, and that the assistant is asked to settle what your words leave open before anything is stored.
So the four things that move a figure are the four things it asks about: the amount, the state, the cooking fat and the variant. What lands in the record carries its source, and an estimate is stored as an estimate, which is what makes a strange week readable a fortnight later.
What it does not do: compute a maintenance figure, recommend a deficit, or hold you to anything. The target is the number you bring.
Saying the amount
The second figure, the one that decides a day: how to give it with a scale, without one, and when the pan has changed the weight.
Days somebody else cooked
Restaurants, chains and a cuisine where a database entry is somebody else's recipe: what to ask before a figure is worth recording.
Reading the day and the numbers behind it
What a day adds up to, which of the three numbers you actually chose, and how to find your own intake.
When the record slips
A day you did not log at the time, and the version of all this that needs no app at all.
Frequently asked questions
How do you track calories?
Take each food, find its figure per 100 g on a label or in a public food table, say how much of it you ate, multiply, and add up the day against a number you chose. The part worth care is the amount: weigh what you can, say whether a weight was raw or cooked, and name the fat that went in the pan, because those three move a figure far more than the table value does.
Do I have to weigh everything?
You do not have to weigh every item. When you weigh selectively, prioritise the foods whose quantity or cooking state changes the meal most; dry grains and added fats are common examples. The rest can be a cup, a spoon or a size word, and a household measure has a gram weight in a reference table, so it converts. What matters is that the record says which figures were weighed and which were judged, so a strange week can be read rather than guessed at.
Is it better to weigh food raw or cooked?
Either, as long as you say which. Pasta and rice take on water and a cooked weight can be two to three times the dry one; meat loses water and comes out denser per 100 g. The mistake is not the choice, it is the silence: a weight given without its state is read against whichever line the table happens to hold.
How long does tracking take?
In a 2019 study of 43 adults using a commercial tracker, the median was about 23 minutes a day in the first month. How often participants recorded was associated with the outcome, while time spent per day was not. The study did not test IZeat; reducing the work around each entry is its design goal, not a measured result.