Calories are Nothing
Context
This project was a collaboration between our Mad Magpies and the development team at We Are Mobile First.
Together we set out to create a better product for people in the dieting and food tracking space because right now, the experience is clunky, time-consuming, and hard to stick with. Users are often left manually inputting everything they eat, which isn’t just annoying it’s also inaccurate.
We wanted to flip that. The goal was to make it easier for people to eat better and understand their food, using AI to reduce friction and improve accuracy
Challenge
Most food tracking apps in the market have two big issues:
They focus only on calorie counting, which isn’t a full picture of health. There’s little focus on the quality of food — how processed it is, what nutrients it contains, and most importantly, how it makes people feel.
They rely heavily on manual input, which is time-consuming, inaccurate, and frustrating for users. People under-report. The UX is clunky. And it creates a huge barrier for people trying to track what they’re eating or make sense of it.
In short, users want to eat better and feel better — but existing tools make that harder, not easier.
Outcome
We designed an app called Calories Are Nothing, We Are Mobile First developed in Flutter, with a tight focus on a clean, frictionless user experience.
Key features and design decisions:
Short onboarding: users just input their height and weight. The app calculates BMI and gets them started instantly.
Image and voice input: users can snap a photo or record a voice note of their meal. AI in the backend identifies the food and assigns a nutrient score across key metrics: protein, fats (good/bad), carbs, processing level, and calories.
Minimal editing: if the AI is slightly off, users can easily make quick edits.
Mood check-ins: a daily pop-up asks users how they feel. This builds a simple but powerful data set to help users track how their food affects their mood and energy over time.
Clear visual data: all nutrition data is displayed in a clean, easy-to-understand interface. No charts that require a science degree.
Lightweight design system: we built a simple, reusable system to make development faster and more consistent.
We also designed and shipped a Framer-based marketing landing page, giving the product a clear home online.
The app is live on both the App Store and Google Play, and users are already starting to engage with it.
