Adipose: A Minimalist Calorie Tracker for iOS

Hey Product Hunt! The start of this year was rough personally, I had a seemingly never-ending string of bad news which unfortunately made me become pretty depressed. When I’m depressed my first instinct is to eat my feelings. During this time I ended up gaining a fair amount of weight, enough so that my entire wardrobe didn’t fit me and I needed to buy all new, larger clothes… This lasted for around 6 months or so, and eventually something clicked in me that said it was time to lose this weight and take back control of myself. I’ve experimented with all sorts of diets, veganism, keto, whatever trendy thing you can imagine, but after all of those diets I realized that what I really wanted was to be able to eat whatever I wanted, therefore I needed to restrict how much of it I eat. The classic calories in / calories out approach. I started my diet in the simplest way I could think of, every day I’d make a new note in Apple Notes, and at each meal I’d jot down every ingredient along with the amount of calories in that ingredient, then throughout the day I’d manually calculate how many calories I’d consumed, and how close I was to my total calorie count for the day.. As you might expect, this was a very manual and pretty boring process. So I looked into some of the calorie tracker apps available in the App Store. After trying out a few of these apps I felt pretty overwhelmed, it felt like every app had way more features than I needed and they were always trying to push me to purchase some sort of subscription which I’m not interested in. I prefer apps that I can buy once and own forever. All of these apps had very unique styling and branding to them, I missed Apple Notes and wished that there was a simple calorie tracker that felt like Apple made it, using their design language and approach to UX. So I set out to make the app I wanted. An intentionally simple “Apple like” calorie tracker that I could use to simply input the ingredients I’m eating and see how close I am to my total calorie goal for the day. I’d never built an iOS app before so I set out to just learn enough to be able to complete the goals of my application and make it work for me daily: 1. Daily Log 2. Ingredients Library 3. Historical View 4. No subscription 5. User owns all their data I’m happy to say that as of this launch, the app is exactly where I need it to be for my own purposes and I’m hoping that it can be useful for any of you too. Selfishly, Adipose has also allowed given me an excuse to try something I’ve always wanted to; take a product idea, no matter how simple, execute on it, and launch it. Thank you for sharing in this with me. Adipose is available for sale on the app store for $4.99 (which, if you'll forgive the cliche, is about the cost of a cappuccino from Starbucks!) Thank you for reading and I’m excited for you to try out Adipose!