I built my own calorie tracking app because every other one annoyed me. I tried MyFitnessPal, paid apps, and the ones that estimate your meal from a photo. Logging one meal still took me three or four minutes. Multiply that by every meal, every day.
As someone with ADHD, that was never going to last. The photo apps felt promising until I spent more time correcting the estimates than actually tracking my food.
So I stopped doing it the usual way. I wrote what I ate in iPhone Notes. At the end of the day, I pasted it into ChatGPT to estimate the calories and macros. If something was off, I corrected the portions and tried again.
It was simple enough to stick with. My friends at the gym started doing the same thing, and then their friends did too.
That was the idea behind NoteCal AI: an app that feels like Notes, but understands what you write about food. Describe the meal, get an estimate, and change the details when you need to.
The interesting part wasn’t inventing a new habit. It was noticing the one that was already working and removing a few steps.