Calorie Bot

A Telegram bot that logs your food from photos, voice notes, or typed text, estimates calories with GPT-4o, and lets you query your daily totals.

Setup

1. Create a Telegram bot

   • Open Telegram, message @BotFather
   • Send /newbot, follow the prompts, copy the token it gives you

2. Get an OpenAI API key

   • https://platform.openai.com/api-keys

3. Postgres Uses your local Postgres (Homebrew postgresql@16). One-time setup:

   psql postgres -c "CREATE DATABASE calorie_bot;"

   The bot creates its tables automatically on first run.

4. Configure

   cp .env.example .env

   Edit .env with your values:

   TELEGRAM_BOT_TOKEN=123456:ABC...
   OPENAI_API_KEY=sk-...
   DATABASE_URL=dbname=calorie_bot user=YOUR_MAC_USERNAME host=localhost
   

5. Run

   uv run bot.py

   Leave this running. Open your bot in Telegram and send /start.

Usage

• Send a photo of your meal → bot identifies items + estimates calories
• Send a voice note describing what you ate → transcribed and estimated
• Type a description, e.g. 2 rotis, dal, and a bowl of rice → estimated
• Every estimate shows a breakdown with a ✅ Save / ❌ Discard button before it's logged, so nothing gets recorded without your confirmation
• Entries are auto-tagged morning/lunch/evening by time of day, and repeat foods (same name + same portion) reuse your previously confirmed calorie/macro value instead of a fresh AI guess each time (marked ♻️) — keeps counts consistent
• /today — today's log grouped by meal, with calorie + macro totals
• /date 2026-07-20 — log for a specific date
• /week — totals for the last 7 days
• /delete <id> — remove a wrongly logged entry (id shown in /today)
• /setgoal 2000 — set a daily calorie goal manually
• /profile 70 175 28 m moderate lose — weight_kg, height_cm, age, sex, activity (sedentary/light/moderate/active/very_active), goal (lose/maintain/gain) — auto-computes your daily calorie target from BMR/TDEE and sets it as your goal
• /logweight 70.5 — log today's weight
• /weight — see your weight trend
• Proactive check-ins at 9:30am (morning), 2pm (lunch), 8pm (evening) IST asking if you've eaten — skipped automatically for any meal you've already logged that day
• /reminders on / /reminders off — toggle these check-ins (on by default)

Keeping it running

This runs as a foreground process on your Mac. To keep it alive in the background:

nohup uv run bot.py > bot.log 2>&1 &

Stop it later with pkill -f "bot.py", or check bot.log for errors.

Notes on accuracy

Calorie estimates are AI-generated best guesses based on what's visible/described — treat them as approximate, not lab-precise. The confirm step exists so you can catch obviously wrong reads before they're saved; if quantity/items are off, discard and resend a corrected text description instead.

Data is stored in a local Postgres database (calorie_bot), never leaves your machine except for the OpenAI API calls needed to analyze each photo/voice note/text.