Does anyone else find it impossible to track calories when you eat Indian food?
I’ve been trying to lose weight for the past year and every calorie tracking app
Yesterday I made dal tadka, jeera rice and some bhindi sabzi for dinner. Simple home food. I open MyFitnessPal and spend 20 minutes searching:
• “Dal tadka” shows 47 different entries with wildly different calories. Which one is my mom’s recipe?
• “Bhindi” doesn’t exist. “Okra” has 12 entries, none of them account for the mustard seeds and oil tadka
• There’s no concept of a “katori” anywhere. Everything is in cups and grams
I just gave up and logged “Indian food dinner - 600 calories” which is basically useless.
The apps just weren’t built for us. They assume you’re eating grilled chicken and measured portions of brown rice. Not pesarattu for breakfast, sambar rice for lunch and whatever mom made for dinner.
The thing that actually would help me is if I could just photograph my plate and have something tell me roughly what’s on it — in terms my mom would actually use. Like katoris not cups. Rotis not “1 serving flatbread.”
I actually started sketching out what an app like this would look like and it got me thinking — is this just my problem or does everyone here deal with this?
And the bigger question: if something like this existed would people actually pay for it? Or would you just expect it to be free like every other app?
Asking because I’m genuinely trying to figure out if this is worth building