While other food logging apps use rough, static formulas or unreliable wearable estimates to inform your calorie targets, Alpha Coach uses a dynamic algorithm that continually updates and refines your personalized expenditure estimate based on your nutrition data and rate of weight gain or loss.
This means Alpha Coach can adapt to changes in your metabolism, ensuring you never plateau and keeps pace with your ever-changing energy needs to ensure your calorie targets are appropriate for your goals.
Comparing Alpha Coach with other popular nutrition apps in India and North America
Adaptive Intelligence – The key algorithm that makes all the difference
Alpha Coach differentiates itself from other nutrition apps by its dynamic coaching algorithms, which ensure that your nutrition goals are appropriate for the goals you have set. When you set a goal in food logging app like Healthifyme or Myfitnesspal, for instance, the app estimates the number of calories you burn per day based on your height, weight, age, gender, and level of activity. The calculator then determines how many fewer or additional calories you should consume per day in order to gain or lose weight at the desired rate.
While this method is reasonable for calculating calorie goals for individuals with limited information, it has two significant drawbacks. First, it can result in initial calorie goals that differ significantly from a person’s actual caloric requirements. The static equations used to estimate energy expenditure (and, consequently, maintenance calories) have the potential to produce fairly substantial errors, with an average error of 350-400 calories per day. Secondly, an individual’s energy requirements fluctuate over time as a result of fluctuating activity levels and metabolic adaptation.
In contrast, Alpha Coach’s system analyses your weight and nutrition data over time to ensure that your energy intake goals are appropriate. Both Healthifyme and Alpha Coach may estimate that you burn 2500 calories per day based on the demographic information you provide during the onboarding process and recommend that you consume 2000 calories per day to achieve your desired rate of weight loss. However, the next step with Alpha Coach is distinct. If you consume 2000 calories per day and your weight loss is slower than desired, Alpha Coach’s algorithms will adjust your daily calorie goal at your next weekly check-in. As metabolic adaptation takes place and your daily energy expenditure decreases, so will your calorie goals. Inversely, if your activity levels increase significantly, your weight loss rate at a given calorie intake will increase. Alpha Coach will detect the change and increase your calorie consumption goals accordingly.
This logic also applies to the opposite situation. If you burn more calories than would be predicted by your basic demographic characteristics, both your regualr calorie tracker and Alpha Coach will initially recommend an intake level that is a bit too low. However, because trackers like Healthifyme and myfitnesspal recommendations lack a robust self-correcting mechanism, your energy intake targets will remain too low, resulting in daily calorie targets that may be unsustainable if you’re attempting to lose weight or too low to result in weight gain if you’re attempting to gain weight. Alpha Coach’s algorithms will determine if you are losing or gaining weight too quickly or too slowly, and will adjust your daily calorie goals accordingly.
In short, Alpha Coach’s algorithms are inherently self-correcting to ensure that your calorie goals are always met. It uses your weight and nutrition data to tailor your calorie intake goals, similar to how a nutrition coach would. Popular apps like Healthifyme or Myfitnesspal, on the other hand, lacks such a system and relies solely on your basic demographic information to estimate your energy needs, with the hope that this approximation will suffice for the duration of your app usage.
Alpha Coach algorithm calculates your metabolism (expenditure) more accurately than top wearables.
Some applications use wearable data to calculate caloric expenditure. In terms of calorie burn calculations, however, even the most accurate device was 27 percent off, on average. The least accurate estimate is found to be 93% off. If you are nerdy and want to understand more check this published paper.
Note that a wearable will only calculate exercise calories, whereas the true metabolic burn is a combination of energy burned at rest (BMR), exercise calories, Non-Exercise-Activity-Thermogenesis (NEAT), and energy burned while digesting food.
Know what Alpha Coach is cooking
In the era, where generative AI tools are taking headlines, Alpha Coach is launching the world’s first autonomous AI nutrition recommendation engine in 2023. With a model that is trained on over 16.7 million data points and growing, will adapt to you based not only on your metabolism but also on your eating patterns, taste preferences, regional cuisine preferences, health issues, allergies, etc. We understand that healthy eating is not about perfection in diet, but being able to make better choices, most of the time. Watch out for our updates, for the launch of our recommendations tool.
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