How Hadeed counts calories from a photo

Photo logging is a three-step loop, and the middle step is the one that matters. The camera is fast; the review is what keeps your diary honest.

• —Snap — open the scanner and photograph the plate. The AI identifies what is on it: the grilled chicken, the rice, the salad, the sauce — as separate items, not one blob.
• —Review — each item shows its estimated calories and macros with a confidence level. Something misread? Remove it, rename it, or adjust the portion before it counts.
• —Save — confirm, and the meal lands in your diary with its full macro breakdown. Roughly three seconds of logging for a plate that would take minutes to look up by hand.

Not every meal is a plate in front of you. Hadeed has three logging paths that all end in the same diary:

• —Photo scan — for cooked meals and mixed plates. AI vision itemizes the food and estimates each component.
• —Barcode scan — for packaged food. Flip the pack, scan the code, and the label's data is logged directly. No estimation involved: label numbers are label numbers.
• —Type it — describe the meal in your own words and the AI computes calories and macros for you. Useful for restaurant meals you have already eaten or food you can't photograph.

Most calorie apps treat every day as a fresh exam you can fail. Hadeed treats the week as the unit that matters: if you overshoot today, tomorrow's and the following days' targets rebalance so the weekly total stays on track. One heavy dinner doesn't end the plan — it gets absorbed.

Your training feeds back into the same budget: calories burned in logged workouts adjust the daily target, so a hard gym day earns a larger allowance instead of pretending your body didn't work for it.

Honest answer: photo estimates are estimates — no camera can weigh food. Hadeed is built to make those estimates trustworthy rather than to pretend they are exact.

• —Per-item confidence — every detected item is scored, and low-confidence items are flagged for your review instead of being silently saved.
• —You stay in the loop — portions and items are editable before saving; the AI proposes, you confirm.
• —Sanity-checked numbers — results are validated against the 4-4-9 rule (about 4 kcal per gram of protein and carbs, 9 per gram of fat), so the macros and the calorie total must actually agree.
• —Labels beat vision — for packaged food, use the barcode path: that's exact label data, not an estimate.

Manual meal logging and barcode diary basics are free, alongside the 1,200+ exercise library and custom workouts. AI photo scanning, AI meal estimates, adaptive plans, and Coach chat are part of the optional Elite subscription via your Apple ID. Hadeed runs on iPhone (iOS 17+) with an Apple Watch app (watchOS 11+).