Photo → numbers → verdict
A number is not an answer.
640 calories is a fact, not a decision. eait scores each meal against targets computed from your body, your goal and whatever you said you have to watch, then tells you what it made of it.
The iPhone app is not out yet — everything on this page describes it. Leave an email and you hear the day it ships.
One email when the iPhone app is out, a confirmation click first, and a one-click way off the list. Nothing else.
Computed from your profile. Deficit capped at 20% of maintenance.
Chicken shawarma, large
640kcalCounted the garlic sauce. Say “no sauce” if there wasn’t any.
What it will not do
Three refusals, and they are the product.
It will not ask for a card.
There is no trial to start and none to forget to cancel. You open it, answer a few questions about your body, and send a meal. There is no paid tier today and no card on file, so there is nothing that can quietly begin charging one.
The largest complaint in this category, by a factor of four, is a charge nobody agreed to.
It will not keep your photo.
The image is read into memory, analysed, and dropped — on the phone and again on the server. Nothing is written to a disk, there is no bucket, there is no staging folder “just for retries”, and no row in any table holds a path to a picture of your food.
Ephemeral by construction, not by retention policy. A policy is a promise; this is an absence.
It will not put your target under the floor.
1,200 kcal for women, 1,500 for men. Whatever the arithmetic upstream produced, the number you are given does not go under it — and when the floor is the reason your target is what it is, the app says so instead of hiding it.
A daily target is the one output of an app like this that can actually harm someone.
How it works
Three moves. The third is the one that matters.
Send the meal.
A photo of the plate, or a sentence — “chicken shawarma, large”. Both go to the same place. Neither needs you to find your food in a database or weigh anything.
Read the numbers.
Calories, protein, carbs, fat, saturated fat, fibre, sugar and sodium — broken out per item and totalled, with what it assumed about each one shown next to it.
Get the verdict.
The meal is scored against your targets, on the dimensions that apply to you. Calories always. Saturated fat if you said you are watching your LDL. Sodium if you said you are watching your kidneys. Three separate judgements, because one meal can be fine on one and not on another.
Accuracy
A photo is an estimate. So it lets you argue with it.
Nobody can weigh your lunch from a picture. An app that behaves as though it can is going to be wrong quietly — and quietly wrong is the failure mode that costs you the month.
So eait shows its working: the items it thinks it saw, and what it assumed about each. When it has that wrong, say so in ordinary words — “half that”, “no oil”, “that is a small one” — or open the item and set the grams yourself. Change one item and its calories rescale by its own density, the totals re-sum, and the verdict is recomputed from your targets.
That last part is not a detail. A verdict is never carried over from the numbers it was first computed on, so it can never describe a meal that has since changed.
What we measured
On 8 reference dishes with weighed ingredients, the median error was about 28%, and the mean signed error was +2% — so it is not quietly flattering you. 8 dishes is a smoke test rather than a study, and saying so is the point: nobody in this category publishes a number at all. Most of what is left is portion size, which is the one thing a sentence can fix.
The floor
The one number it will not compute its way past.
An app that hands you a daily calorie target is doing the single most consequential thing in this category, and the arithmetic that produces it will happily produce a dangerous answer for a small person in a hurry. So three guards run, in this order, every time:
The deficit is capped at a share of maintenance.
20% at most, so the number scales with the person rather than with how impatient the goal is. A 55 kg woman and a 110 kg man asking for the same pace do not get the same cut.
The floor is applied last, and unconditionally.
1,200 kcal for women, 1,500 for men — the widely published minimums for dieting without supervision. Applied after the cap, never before, because a cap applied second can pull a floored number back under the floor.
A target weight under a healthy BMI is refused.
Not warned about, not confirmed with a dialog — refused. Below a BMI of 18.5 the app will not set the target at all.
And when the floor is why your number is what it is, the screen that shows you the number says so. A guard nobody is told about is a guard that only protects the people who were never at risk.
This is the bit where I tell you no. It is the only thing I am strict about.
Privacy
What it never has in the first place.
The app never asks for your email.
Sign in with Apple asks for no email scope at all, and whatever a provider volunteers in its token is discarded before anything is written. The account key is the anonymous subject identifier and nothing else. If you give us an address on this website it lives on a list that touches none of that, and one click removes it.
No photographs.
Read, analysed, dropped. Both ends. There is nothing to leak and nothing to request.
No account, until you want one.
The app works on a device identity it creates for itself. Sign in only if you want the same history on a second phone — and when you do, what you already logged comes with you.
Deletion means deletion.
Delete the account and the meals, the profile and the product analytics go with it. The analytics being in that list costs us the ability to measure anything historical. That was the trade we chose.
Questions
Before you tap.
What does it cost?
There is no paid tier today and no card on file. If that ever changes it will be a thing you decide to do, not a charge that appears because a trial you forgot about ended.
Do I have to make an account?
No. The app creates a device identity for itself and works immediately. Sign in with Apple or Google only if you want your history on another device.
Is this medical advice?
No. It computes targets from what you tell it about your body and scores meals against them. It is not supervision and it does not replace a clinician. If you have been given numbers by one, those are the numbers to follow.
Does it work outside the United States?
It reads what is on the plate rather than looking a barcode up in a product database, so an unfamiliar supermarket is not a wall. Portions and dishes are estimated the same way everywhere — which is to say approximately, and correctably.
Is there an Android version?
Not yet — iPhone first, Android after it has proved itself there. Leave an email on this page and you will hear the day the iPhone app ships.
If not today
Hear when the iPhone app is out.
One address, on a list that lives on this website and nowhere near your meals. It is not connected to an account, it is not used for anything else, and every message carries a link that removes you in one click with no login and no questions. You will get one email asking you to confirm — until you do, the address is on no list at all, and if you never do it is deleted within a week.
Deleting an ieat account does not remove an address from this list — they are separate things, deliberately, and the unsubscribe link is how you leave.
One message. I will not make a habit of it.
I built this while cutting to 92 kg. It judges my meals too, and it has told me no more often than I would like.
One photo. Then an answer you can act on.
No card, nothing to cancel, and nothing kept afterwards. Find out whether you like it before you tell it anything about yourself.