0xCal

The thing 0xCal hangs its hat on. You describe a meal in normal sentences and the app returns calories and macros, no database search or barcode step required. It reads casual phrasing like "two eggs and sourdough toast with butter" and splits it into items you can edit. The point is speed. Logging should feel like texting, not filling out a form. Want to try a meal without typing at all? Just point the camera at it.

When you'd rather not type, snap a photo of the meal. On iPhones with LiDAR, the depth sensor measures the plate and sends that measurement along with the image, so the portion is read from the scene instead of estimated by eye. Home cooking and restaurant plates both work. It's the difference between a guessed portion and a measured one. That matters more than it sounds.

Every entry opens as a list of ingredients with individual weights, not one opaque number you can only accept or delete. Push the fries from 117g to 160g and the total follows. That's the point. If the chat misses something, adding "and some butter" rebuilds the estimate rather than replacing it. That editability is what makes the numbers trustworthy enough to act on.

The first pass on any food is a model estimate, and the app labels it as one. You can leave it, or search the catalog and swap the guess for the actual jar, box, or bottle with the nutrition label attached. Once a food is in your pantry, later meals attach to it instead of guessing again. Correcting a food once is the whole idea.

0xCal doubles as an intermittent fasting app, with plans such as 12:12, 14:10, and 16:8, plus a custom option. You start a fast, watch it run, and review your history afterward. There's also a fasting shield that uses Screen Time to block food apps until your fast ends. Fasting and food logging live in one place, which saves juggling two apps.

Log your weight over time and view progress on a graph, for either loss or gain goals. The app syncs calorie data and weight measurements with Apple Health, so your nutrition sits next to your activity from an Apple Watch. If you already track workouts there, the picture stays in one place instead of scattered.

Home screen widgets let you log meals without opening the app. The interface is built around a dark mode tuned for OLED screens, with no ads and no upsell banners. Small app. Clean screens. At around 25MB, it's a fraction of the size of many trackers, and the developer's pitch is that fewer features done well beats a bloated dashboard.