New PhotoCalorie iPhone Application May Change the Process of Dieting

Many experts say that the key to successful dieting and weight control is an awareness of the amounts and nutritional content of foods eaten. Traditionally this goal has been accomplished through various forms of "calorie counting" using a diet diary or food journal. PhotoCalorie.com has reinvented diet journaling to make it much easier and more flexible. Now you can just Picture Your Diet™ using their new mobile smart phone application.

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Quote startPhotoCalorie beats a food diary and a calorie counter because it combines both functions into one right on your iPhone using a unique visual approach.Quote end

Boston, MA (PRWEB) January 5, 2010

Just in time to address one of the most common New Year's resolutions, doctors and computer scientists working at Boston University, Harvard Medical School and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have invented a new approach to diet diaries and food journaling that works with any diet system. Their Picture Your Diet™ system uses mobile technology to make what used to be a tedious and time-consuming process extremely easy and therefore much more likely to succeed.

PhotoCalorie™ is a new Apple iPhone application that can be used for visual diet journaling. Simply by taking a picture of a meal or snack, and entering a short description, PhotoCalorie will estimate the calorie and nutritional content of the snack or meal and produce daily summaries of the calories and nutrients consumed. Other apps force the user to go through the tedious process of finding a specific food and estimating the quantity eaten. PhotoCalorie greatly simplifies this process by matching the food's photograph and description against a vast, continuously updated nutrition database to return an accurate estimate of the nutritional contents of a meal. Keeping a food diary is now as easy as doing a Google search. For home-cooked meals, PhotoCalorie's estimates can be edited and in this way the application is able to learn unique diet patterns and become more and more customized to personal needs over time. According to two of the inventors, Adam Marcus and Vincent Fusaro, the more people who use the system, the better the results get for all users, including the more than 1300 people who have reportedly downloaded PhotoCalorie during its first 72 hours in the Apple iTunes store.

Dr. Caroline Apovian, Director of the Nutrition and Weight Management Center at Boston University Medical Center and author of the famous alli Diet Plan said: "PhotoCalorie is an innovative way to help those struggling to lose weight keep track of calories before they get out of hand," she continued "PhotoCalorie beats a food diary and a calorie counter because it combines both functions into one right on your iPhone using a unique visual approach."

Counting calories is an analytical 'left brain' approach to dieting and PhotoCalorie can be used with any of the commercial weight loss programs (such as alli, Nutrisystem, Jenny Craig, Lifestyle, Sunfare, 5squares) and popular diet books such as the 'You on a Diet' Waist Management Eating Plan by Dr. Roizen and Dr. Oz. But PhotoCalorie and the Picture Your Diet™ system can also be used in a new, visual 'right brain' manner. By simply taking pictures of meals and snacks, and skipping the description and calorie counts, daily or weekly goals can be assessed by looking at pictures rather than studying numerical data. Such a plan might include goals like 'reduce the number of fast food meals per week from 5 to 2.' Because PhotoCalorie also records the time of day when food is eaten, it can measure other goals such as 'have only one dessert (or one beer, etc.) per week, on Friday nights.' Other unique ways to use PhotoCalorie will appear in the blog and discussion forum on the company's web site.

PhotoCalorie version 1.0 is available for free in the iTunes store. The application is currently being implemented on other mobile devices and you can make suggestions and sign up for the mailing list at http://www.PhotoCalorie.com.

About PhotoCalorie LLC
PhotoCalorie LLC was co-founded by Mark Boguski, Vincent Fusaro, Larry Istrail and Adam Marcus. Mark Boguski, M.D., Ph.D. is on the faculty of Harvard Medical School at the Francis Countway Library of Medicine and also in the Department of Pathology at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. He has previously held positions at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, the U.S. National Institutes of Health, the U.S. National Library of Medicine and as an executive in the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries. Vincent Fusaro, Ph.D. is a National Library of Medicine Fellow in the Center for Biomedical Informatics at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Fusaro holds a B.S. in mechanical engineering and has a background in robotic programming, machine vision, and custom automation. Larry Istrail holds a B.S. in Clinical Exercise Physiology from Boston University and currently pursuing a master's degree in Applied Anatomy and Physiology with a specialization in Nutrition. Adam Marcus is pursuing his Ph.D. in Computer Science at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL), where he is part of the Database and the Haystack groups. Prior to MIT, Mr. Marcus received his B.S. in Computer Science and Mathematics from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

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