Introducing Food XRAY
The simplest & most powerful nutrition tracker ever
Everyone knows nutrition is important, but tracking all your food and analyzing all your calories every day is hard. Almost no one does it, and even if they do the data is often incorrect.
We have finally solved this problem. We’re excited to announce the new Food XRAY membership, now available as a new level for all Gyroscope members.
Now you can just take photos of your food to automatically get the nutrition facts for the meal and detailed insights from a team of human nutritionists. It tracks not just your calorie history, but every important chemical in your diet. Then, get actionable insights to actually improve your eating habits & health.
XRAY is now the easiest and simplest way to log your food.
Calories, macros, fiber, caffeine, alcohol, vitamins, minerals, glucose stability, muscle protein synthesis, meal grades and much more are viewable for every meal and shown in your Gyroscope trends alongside your steps, sleep, bodyfat and other metrics. With this addition, you can now measure every important variable that affects your health in the same app, and with minimal effort.
Watch the short video to get the full tour of how it works, or keep on reading to learn more about all the features and benefits…
Accurate data on your trends page is just one of the benefits. Using that data, you will get detailed feedback for each meal to improve your nutrition and reach your goal — whether it is losing bodyfat, gaining muscle, or simply maintaining your health.
Previously only available in our most premium Gyroscope Coach level, we realized that a human coach was unaffordable or unnecessary for some. Now this signature food tracking from X is available to everyone in XRAY without the human coach, at half the monthly cost.
You’re probably used to your steps and sleep being automatically tracked. Why should food still require hours of manual work? Most people end up avoiding it, though it is often the most important. Now, it doesn’t have to!
Approximately 88 million American adults — more than 1 in 3 — have prediabetes … more than 84% don’t know they have it — The CDC
Why photos?
Our coaches and most nutritionists would agree: while macros and calories definitely count, making the actual counting of them your primary weight loss method can be an unfulfilling exercise. If it works for you, great! We discovered it’s not practical for many, and doesn’t always address the root causes needed for long term change.
So what else can you do? Take photos! And leave the counting to our team. You’re in good hands now.
Photos tell so much more of the story too — the what, the who, the where and the when — and combined with advanced analysis, insights and features such as the Academy and Health Labs.
Hundreds of people have already been using this system for many years now, and we have countless case studies to validate the life-changing benefits of eating healthy.
Food XRAY may be one of the best investments you make this year.
How it started
We first started tracking food photos as part of the Gyroscope X coaching initiative, pairing members with an expert coach to guide them on all parts of their health. At the time, Gyroscope knew everything except food.
Calories, macronutrients and glucose levels were synced from other apps, but the without the actual meal names, photos or even timings, the coaches were unable to provide very useful feedback. We had optimized everything else — sleep, steps, workouts, etc. — but people were still struggling to lose weight.
This was disappointing because we had spent years building ways to sync that data, and now had to start from scratch. For a while we wondered if obesity was just an unsolvable problem.
Then, we added food photos. From that point, everything changed. We were able to quickly find and fix basic mistakes that people were making every single day. Despite getting perfect sleep or working out every day, these types of bad habits or misinformation were holding people back from seeing amazing results.
With the guidance of the coach reviewing their meals, people’s health improved rapidly. We started posting case studies of what they changed.
We launched this last year and it has changed the lives of many people. Many more people signed up this year and have been getting the same results. Now hundreds of people rely on this system to manage their health and are in the best shape of their lives.
There was just one problem. Having a full human team is expensive. The people who are already successful in life are able to use it and reinvest in themselves. For others, the $199 a month price tag is out of reach, even though it is a great value and half the cost of other offerings.
In the past year, we’ve continued to automate and streamline the experience, bringing affordable health coaching to more people with tools like the Health Score, Health Academy and Health Labs. These start to bring the latest health insights to anyone with an Apple Watch or even just a phone.
Now, for the first time, XRAY brings the same approach that you use for your steps, sleep, workout and productivity — with realtime tracking and precise feedback —to your nutrition at an affordable monthly price.
The instructions to use it are very simple: Just take photos of your food before you eat. If you are already doing this, then you’re halfway there!
Your fasting times will be calculated instantly (using the times on the photos) and a team of expert nutritionists & dietitians will then analyze all the macro and micronutrients for you, providing powerful insights and guidance about that meal. The food analysis is generally ready later that day, or in time for the next day’s morning report so you can review the grades for yesterday’s meals.
In addition to all of the Track & Score features, XRAY provides:
- The Metabolic Coach grades each meal to show you its effects
- Follow the insights & guides in the Academy to keep improving
- See an accurate history of your nutrient trends for the first time
Your Meal Grade from the Metabolic Coach.
Under the calories and macros, the first thing you’ll see is the meal grade. This takes everything into account, from the amount of protein to how processed the food is or how dense it is in important vitamins and minerals.
A low grade such as a D or an F doesn’t mean you can never eat something, but rather that it’s something you should only have occasionally. Life and good health is about finding that balance. The grade also provides further advice on how often to repeat something, so you can fully understand the impact of each meal and how often you should have them.
Eating cake on someone’s birthday, for example, is great — but having it after every meal is probably not wise. Balancing it with full meals is also important, for example eating cake on its own vs after a balanced meal can have a very different impact on your glucose levels. Powered by years of insights from real human coaches, the metabolic coach understands all these distinctions and gives you the correct context and guidance to make these decisions correctly!
Energy Balance
Is your meal keeping you in a calorie deficit in order to facilitate fat loss, or is it tipping you over the edge? Perhaps you’re building muscle and want a slight surplus. Neither is “good” or “bad” but rather important tools you can use to manage your body, and important to be aware of.
Stay aware of your calorie balance with the energy balance meter to understand whether to increase or decrease your portion sizes or meals.
While calorie balance gets the most attention, there are many other factors in a meal that need to be analyzed. There are thousands of other apps that can also track your calories, but Food XRAY with real humans allows you to measure all the other equally important variables.
Food Processing
There is a large spectrum when it comes to processed foods, but our food processing meter will keep things in line. As much as possible, whole foods should be the aim of the game. More nutrient dense and no additives, preservatives or nasty things like trans fats. Just food, as it should be.
Muscle Protein
Is your meal preserving or building your lean muscle tissue? Muscle protein synthesis (MPS) is the metabolic process of protein and specific amino acids like leucine being used for the growth and repair of muscle tissue. If you’re trying to lose fat, you want this meter up to preserve muscle. If you’re building muscle, you want to be stimulating MPS for optimal gains!
Nutrient Density
Vitamins, mineral and phytonutrients (nutrients from plant-based foods). Have fun seeing how often you can keep these three crucial bars as full as possible, and get healthier ands healthier in the process.
Hunger & Satiety
Many enzymes and hormones are at play when it comes to hunger and satiety, but modern life has made it hard to stay in touch with our systems as we once were. The hunger or satiety meter will tell you how filling the meal was so you can fuel your body correctly and not feel constantly hungry.
We’re often mistaking psychological triggers for hunger, eating when we don’t need to such as when we’re bored or stressed, or eating foods which will cause blood sugar spikes and crashes that create false feelings of hunger. And the cycle continues. For more details, check out the complete guide on Hunger.
Glucose Stability
We’ve spent a lot of time testing all the latest glucose monitors. Glucose tracking was in the first version of Gyroscope X we released years ago, but it turns out most people don’t have the time, energy or budget to track their glucose themselves every day. Most people just want to be told by their coach what is the optimal meal to have.
Though there are slight variations by person—affected by many variables like muscle mass, insulin sensitivity, Health Score, time, and even stress levels—the best practices and ultimate insights were very similar for everyone.
Now you can skip ahead to the actual insights, noting what meals are likely to destabilize your glucose the most. This is relevant because high blood sugar can lead to increased hunger and energy dips later in the day (or eventually, even insulin resistance and diabetes). The entire composition and even timing of the meal affects this, rather than just a single ingredient being good or bad.
You can still use your favorite glucose monitor with Gyroscope (and ketones too) for even more precision and insight. The blood sugar graph will show in your daily report next to the foods. For everyone else, these insights will save the you the many hundreds or thousands of dollars of doing it yourself, making metabolic health accessible to everyone—not just the ultra rich.
There are many arguments about which which of these variables are the one you need to track —is it knowing your calories, or keeping your blood sugar spikes managed, or avoiding overly processed foods, or getting enough protein? It turns out ALL are important.
Until now, people never had the tools to see all of these at the same time and ended up over-focusing on just one aspect. Now you can see the full picture and your health will reflect that!
Approximately 88 million American adults — more than 1 in 3 — have prediabetes. Of those with prediabetes, more than 84% don’t know they have it. Prediabetes puts you at increased risk of developing type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and stroke — The CDC
What is metabolic health and why should you care?
Bodyfat is often the single variable people think about, but there is much more to the equation. Other important variables like your insulin resistance, visceral fat levels, excess fat in the liver, and others add up to your metabolic health.
In the shorter term, being metabolically unhealthy can cause you to feel tired or hungry all the time, have suboptimal glucose levels (too high or too low), not respond well to common meals, and much more. High blood sugar not only feels bad, but can cause serious health problems like heart disease, vision loss, and kidney disease. Even more seriously, these conditions are correlated with the most common causes of death, like heart attack and stroke.
Once it gets more serious, it is classified as Type 2 Diabetes, but this is not something that happens overnight. There is a spectrum ranging from being relatively unhealthy, to being prediabetic, to having diabetes. Sometimes this corresponds to increasing bodyfat levels, but not always. Many people are moving dangerously this journey right now, often without even knowing. The CDC estimates that 84% of people with prediabetes are not aware.
If all your meals with XRAY are below a C, then it is very likely you are in this category and may not even realize it. These issues generally arise from having consistently unhealthy eating habits, and not just eating a big dessert once. Consistently eating high quality and well balanced meals will keep you safe, still able to enjoy yourself without being at risk of developing diabetes or other serious health conditions.
Is it just some AI that detects the food?
We experimented with many different versions, including common AI based food detection or using low-cost people in other countries. Neither approach had a high enough accuracy to be trusted or result in good health outcomes. Instead, we built a team of real experts that you can trust to do it as well or even better than you could yourself.
Identifying what food is in a photo is only a small part of the equation. After that, they need to figure out the exact grams or serving size of each ingredient in order to do a correct measurement. This is where a casual user often doesn’t know what to do and ends up picking a random value or the default option. Ultimately, the end result from many common food tracking apps can be off by
Are the calories accurate?
Yes. Calorie counts are just one of the dozens of variables being measured.
The data generated is usually as accurate or even more accurate than if you do it yourself in another app. This is because it is being done by people who have studied this field for many years and analyzed thousands of more meals than you would. This does make it more expensive than other apps, but the results are generally well worth the extra cost.
How do they know what is in the picture if it is hidden?
Of course, the team is not psychic—just experienced in nutrition.
If there is something not pictured in the photo, it can be added to the description for increased accuracy. For example, if you are eating a burrito and know exactly what it inside, mentioning that in the caption can help. However, if it is the same one you usually have, or if it is a standard order, then this could be skipped. We use dozens of ways to ensure the data is as accurate as possible, including using the attached location (if you use Places) to find the menus, understanding your previous history and habits, using obscure clues from the photo like other objects for scale, and much more.
The more nonstandard the item is, the more you may want to add some details as text. In other cases, you may be able to take a photo of a different angle or position that better reveals the ingredients — for example a smoothie before blending everything, from a menu before ordering, a second photo of a nutrition label, from an opened version of that reveals the layers, etc.
Since XRAY is powered by actual intelligent humans, it is constantly learning and improving as you use it, and can adapt to the countless scenarios that you will reach in the real world. Restaurants, eating at home, packaged foods, shared meals, etc. In the very worst case, someone from the team may contact you to get more details about what you ate. Specifying these things just once will then make your daily data much accurate.
It is mostly up to you how much time and energy you want to spend. Some people enjoy just adding a photo with no details and are happy with a rough estimate, while others go as far as to weigh out every single ingredient.
Does it include a coach?
Food XRAY has automated guidance from the food grades, and tools like the Health Academy and Health Labs. For people who are self-motivated and just want the data, they can read all the science and manage their own health.
Behind the scenes, real humans will still be analyzing your food, but you won’t need to interact with them or talk to them. However, if you ever need help there is a human support chat in the app. This can be used to ask questions about particular foods, share additional details about your meals for improved accuracy, or any other questions about the Gyroscope app.
Do I need a coach?
Having a human coach who has access to all that data will always be the best way to get the best results. There is no substitute for the accountability and personalization that an expert can provide. We have assembled a team of the world’s best coaches who can advise you on not just one topic like weightlifting, but everything from nutrition, exercise, sleep and general health.
For those who can’t afford the full experience or would rather do it on their own, this new XRAY level provides you with the same data and metabolic scoring previously only available to Gyroscope Coach clients.
How much does it cost?
Gyroscope Food XRAY costs $99 a month. This includes all the base features from Track & Score (like Health Score and Academy), plus automatic food analysis and the metabolic coach features.
Those who want additional accountability or personalized instructions can also add a dedicated human coach. With Coach, it is $199/month.
For anyone with prediabetes or struggling with their health, this will probably be the best investment you ever make. For those who can’t afford that or aren’t ready to start, food photos with just fasting times can be tracked for free in the Gyroscope app. Just the simple act of logging your food photos and knowing your daily fasting times can start to provide many benefits and improve your nutrition choices.
