Hi, I’m Pete. Yes, I am just a regular middle-aged guy and a one-man show behind the scenes here.
I’ve been into health and fitness for pretty much my entire adolescent and adult life. I’ve also struggled with health and fitness throughout… well, pretty much my entire adolescent and adult life.
The time at which my journey—and struggle—began was the early 2000s. The internet was young, and good-quality health and fitness information was not so easy to find. Broscience, as they called it, was everywhere, and the prevailing sentiment was that more complexity yielded better results. We had to eat six small meals a day, with this exact amount and type of protein. We needed to do these exercises, in this exact way. We needed to eat “clean,” and no one could seem to agree on what that actually meant. Oh, and of course, we needed a laundry list of supplements to make it all work.
Suffice to say, it was a confusing and overwhelming time for the average person, who most often made haphazard attempts and achieved partial, mediocre results. That’s how it was for me, at least.
But the quality of information did start to improve and converge onto something concrete. More scientific evidence was getting published, and it was also becoming more accessible. And with that, I was eventually able to get the results that I so desperately wanted.
Until I lost them. Because life gets in the way, as it turns out. Maintaining health and fitness results over the long run is hard. Harder than getting them in the first place, I’d argue.
And so I got them again, lost them again, and got them again, and… well, you get the idea. It’s the infamous diet yo-yo in action.
I struggled with a question that a lot of other people do too: how do we not only get the results that we want, but keep them?
This is what a lot of people said, and still say: we must adopt a “health and fitness lifestyle.” Forge an entire identity around it and become one with it.
But the more I thought about that idea, while perpetually enduring my struggles, I started to realize that it was actually just… dumb.
I’m sorry, but I don’t want a “health and fitness lifestyle”—I want to spend as little time and effort on it as possible. The bare effective minimum. The opposite of an entire “lifestyle.” Just like no one wants a “dental hygiene lifestyle” either—we simply want to do what’s necessary to keep our teeth clean and healthy, then get on with our day.
I eventually decided to take my anti-health-and-fitness message to the internet myself and started a blog. It became pretty successful. I wrote a book and coached clients too. It eventually ran its course and life took me in a different direction, but the sentiment strongly remained, and it’s a sentiment that I still think is criminally underdiscussed.
The most important thing I had to learn, accept, and figure out how to implement in my life is the fact that calories do matter, and that overall food intake is what ultimately dictates a person’s weight. Unsurprisingly, during my bouts of success, the one thing that was always true is that I was tracking calories.
But it was always a chore, a pain really, and a constant source of anxiety. Instead of being excited to go to a restaurant with my friends, I was worried about how I would track it and not overeat.
And then the apps. Also a pain to deal with. Thumbing through 50 kinds of pizza to figure out which one best represents what’s sitting in front of me. Becoming a forensic food accountant trying to deconstruct an entrée into individual ingredients. Swiping through a bloated UI that tracked metrics I didn’t care about. And so on.
It got to a point where, in order to have any hope of sustaining the whole thing, I created a custom food called “AAA” valued at 100 calories and just guesstimated what I was eating. I had gotten pretty good at doing that, and that was better than nothing. It was a silly workaround, and obviously not how these apps were intended to be used, but it did illuminate what I actually wanted out of a tracking app.
I wasn’t trying to create a museum-quality record of everything that ever entered my mouth; I just wanted help making the right decisions to keep things on the rails. In other words, am I within my calorie target for the day? Because that’s like 90% of the battle when it comes to weight management.
And then came the idea: why not try to build the app that I wanted myself? An app that was designed to be ultra simple and make the process of counting calories “good enough” while taking as little time and effort as possible. I don’t want a health and fitness lifestyle, remember? I just want to get this stuff over with and not think about it any more than I have to.
And that’s how CalorieLite was born. A dead-simple, one-page app with one button: describe what you ate, let AI calculate the calories, and log it for you. Done. That’s it. I made this app for the most important target customer: myself.
But since I have it, I might as well put it out there for other people to use and benefit from too, right?