How many calories in this meal?

Some of us need to take care what and how much we eat. I for one have a tendency to get more calories than I burn, which often have the expected consequence – my clothes shrinks…

I have tried counting calories, but that is hard. Even though apps exists, which makes it easier, I still think it is time consuming and not fun. Also in the end – do I really need to know whether this is 852 calories or 943? Wouldn’t it be fine if I could get an estimated number to help me guide myself?

Can AI estimate calories?

Let’s try to use AI as our calorie estimation engine…

Last week on my way to a Kirk Franklin concert (amazing experience btw) we stopped at a Thai restaurant and I ordered a Pad Thai with Chicken dish, so I gave this picture to our AIs

and asked using this prompt:

Can you give me an estimate of how many calories this dish contains?

After getting a result, I then asked

Does your estimate change if I say that this is at a restaurant?

and here are the results:

AI	Estimate	Estimate on restaurant
Meta AI	Sorry I can’t understand images yet.
Grok	Oops, something broke. Talk to me later?
Copilot	480-660	700-900
Claude	400-600	600-800
Mistral	700-900	850-900
Gemini	700-1000	1000-1200
ChatGPT	800-1000	1000-1300

Pretty significant differences and for sure the information about that this was at a restaurant, changed the estimate pretty dramatical. The learnings from this is that we need to be specific. Lets retry with a different prompt:

I ordered this adult portion of Pad Thai with Chicken at a Thai restaurant in Copenhagen. Can you estimate the number of calories in the dish?

Now even including the city and which type of restaurant.

AI	Revised estimate
Copilot	700-900
Gemini	800-1000
Claude	800-1000
ChatGPT	850-1100
Mistral	1000-1300

Asking the chef, he estimated the portion to be around 900-1000 calories without giving any guarantee obviously.

Verdict

Just shooting a picture and asking AI to estimate isn’t very reliable, but the more context you add, the closer the AIs will get at giving an estimate on your dish. You cannot use AI for actual calorie calculations, but you can use AI as an indicator on whether this is covering your daily intake – or you can have a desert afterwards…

This post was written on September 16th, 2025 – AIs might/will change…

Until next time

A Daily Prompt | Freddy Kristiansen