New App Shows You What 200 Calories Looks Like

Calorific(NEW YORK) — Think one tiny piece of pie won’t sabotage your diet? Thanks to a new app that depicts 200 calories worth of common foods, you can stop kidding yourself.

The Calorific app presents 200 calorie serving sizes in clean and simple images, taking the guess work out of portion control.

“We saw some apps that showed how many calories are in a meal but we thought it would be useful to show the individual foods,” said Nic Mulvaney, the British graphic designer who designed the app.

The minuscule amount of peanut butter you get for 200 calories is somewhat disheartening. And you can only eat about three quarters of a burger — hold the bun — before hitting the 200 calorie threshold. But for an equal number of calories you can chow down on a huge mound of berries, two humongous heads of lettuce or five lemons.

To come up with exact portion sizes, Mulvaney and his photographer friend Tim Diacon trawled several nutritional databases and pored over the nutritional information on food packaging. After an epic grocery shopping trip, they spent three days chopping, measuring and photographing more than 140 regularly eaten foods.

“We kept sneaking bits of the samples so towards the end we got quite sick of eating,” Mulvaney said of the app’s photo shoot.

The free app comes with about 30 food images preloaded, but “unlocking” all the food photos costs $2.99. Some of the foods aren’t recognizable to many Americans but Mulvaney said they plan to add many more in the near future.

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