Who builds this
My name is Emad Shawakri, and I am a software developer. I designed and built MyPlate — the iOS app, the service that passes your photo to the AI model, and this website — and I am the one who maintains it. There is no content team, and no committee. If something in the app is wrong, it is my mistake to fix.
Which MyPlate this is
The name is shared, so it is worth being plain about it. This is MyPlate: AI Calorie Counter, an independent iPhone app. It is not the U.S. Department of Agriculture's MyPlate — the plate diagram that replaced the food pyramid in 2011, published at myplate.gov. I have no affiliation with the USDA and no endorsement from it. There are also several unrelated apps on the App Store using the same two words; if you want to be sure you have this one, it is the one linking back to this site.
The USDA's guidance is good, and some of the research this app cites sits alongside it. But when the app tells you something, the responsibility is mine, not a federal agency's.
What I am not
I am not a dietitian, a nutritionist or a clinician. No number in MyPlate comes from my own expertise in nutrition, and none of it is medical advice.
That is precisely why the app does not ask you to take my word for anything. Every figure it produces traces back to published, citable work rather than to a house opinion:
- Your daily calorie target comes from the Mifflin-St Jeor equation (1990), which outperformed the alternatives when they were compared against measured metabolic rate in 2005.
- The activity multipliers behind it are the physical activity levels published in the Dietary Reference Intakes.
- Your protein, carb and fat split sits inside the Acceptable Macronutrient Distribution Ranges from the same report.
- The app refuses to set a target below 1,200 calories a day for women or 1,500 for men, following the NIH/NHLBI weight-management guidelines. A percentage-based deficit scales down with the person, and without that floor the arithmetic will happily produce a number nobody should eat unsupervised.
All of it, with links to the papers and the guidelines, is on the health sources page — and the same list is inside the app, under Profile. If you find a number that does not match the source it claims, email me and I will correct it.
Why I built it
The hard part of calorie counting has never been the arithmetic. It is the logging: searching a database, choosing between a dozen near-identical entries for the same sandwich, and guessing at grams. That is the step people quit over, usually within a fortnight of starting.
Pointing a camera at the plate is a shorter path. That is the whole idea, and everything else in the app exists to support it.
What it deliberately does not do
An honest account of a product includes its limits, so:
- A scan is an estimate, not a measurement. Portion size, preparation and hidden ingredients all move the number. If a food carries a label, the label is the better source.
- There is no food database, no barcode scanner and no recipe library. Every estimate comes from the AI reading a photo or a description.
- The targets are population formulas, not a plan written for you. They are a starting point to adjust from once you can see what you actually eat.
Where your data lives
There is no account in MyPlate — no email, no password, no login. Your meals, weights and targets are stored on your device and are not uploaded, which also means they cannot be recovered if you delete the app. A photo you scan is sent to the AI service to be identified and is not kept afterwards.
That was a deliberate choice rather than an oversight: the less of your food diary I hold, the less there is to lose. The privacy policy lists every third party the app talks to and exactly what each one receives.
Get in touch
Questions, corrections, bug reports and disagreements about a number all go to the same place: support@myplate.site. I read them. You can also find me on LinkedIn.
If you are here for the numbers rather than the app, the calorie calculator runs the same arithmetic in your browser, free and without downloading anything.