Documentation
How to use Calorite, and the research behind the numbers it shows you. Every formula and cutoff below is also enforced in the app itself — this page documents real behavior, not aspirational copy.
Overview
Calorite is a calorie and macro tracker built around one idea: most food-tracking apps quietly assume a Western plate, and most people don't eat one. Every meal you log — however you log it — goes toward a daily calorie and macro target that's calculated for you at onboarding using a real clinical equation, not a flat 2,000 kcal default.
This page covers two things: how to actually use the app's features, and the research and formulas behind the numbers it shows you. For the product's cuisine-recognition approach specifically, see Cuisines; for pricing mechanics, see Pricing.
Account & trial
Creating an account requires a date of birth — Calorite requires users to be 18 or older, since the calorie-target formula below (Mifflin-St Jeor) is validated against an adult cohort and its accuracy isn't established for adolescents, whose growth-driven energy needs differ.
Right after sign-up, onboarding walks through a short quiz (age, sex, height, weight, activity level, goal) and calculates your personalized daily calorie target before you reach the main app — see Your calorie target for exactly how. A free trial starts automatically; there's no separate free tier to opt into or out of. See Pricing for why.
AI photo scan
Take or upload a photo of your meal. The app identifies each distinct item, draws a bounding box around it, estimates its serving weight, and calculates calories and macros — cuisine-aware, see Cuisine recognition below. Each item also lists its key ingredients (e.g. "chicken, onion, tomato, ghee, spices"), so the calorie number reads as an explanation, not just a figure. You can adjust any item's portion, macros, or ingredient list, add anything the scan missed, and remove anything it got wrong before saving.
Hidden-fat detection. When the model sees visual cues of added oil or fat beyond what a dish typically has — pooling oil, a heavy shine, visible ghee or butter, a deep-fried surface — it flags the meal and offers one-tap chips to add the specific oil or sauce, rather than silently under-counting it.
Photo-based estimation is inherently approximate, especially for mixed dishes, unusual angles, or dishes hidden under a sauce. Treat every AI photo-scan number as a practical estimate for tracking trends, not a lab measurement — corrections you make also feed back into improving future scans.
AI food search
Describe what you ate in plain language — "two eggs and toast with butter" — in any of the app's supported languages, and it's parsed into a logged entry. Search also matches directly against USDA FoodData Central's "Generic" (single, unbranded foods) and "Branded" (packaged products with exact label nutrition) entries, plus Calorite's own crowdsourced Global Food Database for dishes neither reference source covers well.
Barcode & voice logging
Barcode scanning reads a packaged product's barcode for exact label nutrition, checked against USDA first and Open Food Facts when USDA doesn't have a match.
Voice logging lets you say what you ate hands-free — useful mid-cook or mid-meal when picking up your phone isn't convenient.
Manual entry & templates
Build a food from scratch with Manual Entry when none of the above fit, or save any logged meal as a template ("Saved Meals") for one-tap re-logging of the things you eat often. Any logged item — from any logging method — can be edited afterward from its detail page; portions, calories, and macros all scale together.
Your calorie target
Your daily calorie target is computed in three steps, all from your onboarding answers:
Step 1 is the Mifflin-St Jeor equation, the clinical standard for estimating resting energy expenditure:
Mifflin MD, St Jeor ST, Hill LA, Scott BJ, Daugherty SA, Koh YO. "A new predictive equation for resting energy expenditure in healthy individuals." Am J Clin Nutr. 1990;51(2):241–247. PMID: 2305711. DOI: 10.1093/ajcn/51.2.241
It was chosen over the older Harris-Benedict equation (1919) because later validation work found it more accurate across a broader modern population, including overweight and obese adults:
Frankenfield D, Roth-Yousey L, Compher C. "Comparison of predictive equations for resting metabolic rate in healthy nonobese and obese adults." J Am Diet Assoc. 2005;105(5):775–789.
Activity level
BMR is scaled to Total Daily Energy Expenditure (TDEE) with a standard PAL (physical activity level) multiplier — the same activity-factor scale used by, among others, the Mayo Clinic and the NIH Body Weight Planner:
Goals & adjustments
Your onboarding goal applies a fixed percentage adjustment to TDEE, chosen within the ranges commonly cited for a sustainable pace rather than exposed as a user-tunable slider:
Trexler ET, Smith-Ryan AE, Norton LE. "Metabolic adaptation to weight loss: implications for the athlete." J Int Soc Sports Nutr. 2014;11:7. · Iraki J, Fitschen P, Espinar S, Helms E. "Nutrition Recommendations for Bodybuilders in the Off-Season." Sports (Basel). 2019;7(7):154.
Safety limits
The calculation above can never actually reach an unsafe number, because a hard floor and ceiling are enforced after every calculation — onboarding, weekly banking, and Adaptive TDEE alike:
- Hard floor: 1,200 kcal/day (female), 1,500 kcal/day (male) — a target is never allowed below this, regardless of what the formula, banking, or Adaptive TDEE would otherwise imply.
- Hard ceiling: 4,000 kcal/day — an absolute cap, independent of activity level or a muscle-gain surplus.
These limits are deliberately not user-adjustable. If your calculated target hits either bound, the app shows you that it was clamped and why, rather than silently applying a number your inputs didn't actually produce.
Weekly calorie banking
An optional setting (Account > Weekly rollover) that lets unused budget from earlier days in the week raise today's target, and overspending lower it — so one heavier day doesn't need to derail the rest of the week, and one lighter day doesn't just vanish. A calorie week runs Monday to Sunday.
Banking is bounded on both sides so it can't run away in either direction: today's effective target can move at most 20% above or below your base target, and never past the hard floor or ceiling from Safety limits above, whichever is tighter.
Adaptive TDEE
Where the calculation in Your calorie target is derived from stated inputs (age, weight, activity level), Adaptive TDEE is derived from observed outcomes: your actual weight trend against your actual logged intake over time. Once at least 5 days of weight-log data spanning at least 5 days, with at least 5 days of intake data in that span, are available, the app can estimate your real maintenance calories and suggest an updated target — capped at no steeper than a 1,000 kcal/day deficit from that estimate, and still bounded by the same hard floor and ceiling.
Below that data threshold, the app declines to suggest anything rather than react to noise — a two-day water-weight swing isn't a trend.
Cuisine recognition
The AI photo scan classifies every meal into a cuisine bucket — South Asian, East Asian, Western, or other — before estimating it, and applies that cuisine's own cooking conventions (typical oil, typical portion) rather than a single Western-default assumption. Nutrition is cross-checked against USDA FoodData Central and, for South Asian dishes, the Indian Food Composition Tables (IFCT) as well. See the full Cuisines page for the complete breakdown.
Squads
Small groups of friends who see each other's daily logging presence and streaks for accountability, and can share specific meals to the group's feed. Sharing is per-user and per-Squad: presence only, name + photo, or full nutrition details — nothing is shared to a Squad automatically.
Fasting timer & water tracking
The fasting timer supports 16:8, 18:6, 20:4, and 24h presets, a custom duration, or a recurring daily eating window (e.g. "eat 12pm–8pm every day") that the home screen tracks automatically.
Water tracking has quick-add buttons sized to a cup or bottle, plus a slider for an exact daily total, a configurable goal, and a cups/metric unit toggle.
Reminders
Account > Meal reminders enables a daily nudge for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snack, each with its own time, plus an end-of-day check-in that only actually fires if you haven't logged anything all day — logging even one thing cancels it for that day.
Data & privacy
You can export a full copy of everything you've logged (Account > Export my data) or permanently delete your account and all associated data (Account > Delete account & data) at any time from within the app. For what's collected and why, see the Privacy Policy; for subscription and billing terms, see the Terms of Service.